The Straw Men

'The Upright Man,' I said. 'Who the hell is that?'

Part 3

History is on our heels, following us like our shadows, like death.

Marc Augé

Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

22

Sarah didn't remember the first time she thought she'd heard him. A day or two ago, maybe. He was coming slowly, biding his time. He'd come in the night before, she believed, fading away again as soon as he knew that she'd realized something was afoot. She'd wondered if she might be sensing him during the day, too, but back then her head had been clearer and she'd been able to convince herself that she was just being fanciful. Then late one afternoon she heard him above her, and she knew that if he was coming in the daytime then things had to be getting worse.

The psycho had visited a couple of hours before it happened. He had talked for quite a long time. He had just talked and talked and talked. Some of it was about scavenging. Some of it was about a plague. Some of it was about some place called Castenedolo in Italy, which sounded like a place you'd go on holiday and drink nice drinks and maybe have some food like spaghetti or salami or steak or squid or soup but obviously wasn't. Instead it was a place where they'd found some guy buried and where he was found proved he was made out of Plasticine or Pliocene and at least two million years old and what did she think of that?

Sarah didn't really think much about it either way. She tried very hard to concentrate on what she was being told but over the last day or so had started to feel very ill for much of the time. She had given up asking for food, and wasn't especially hungry any more. She just made noises, little grunting sounds, when the man stopped talking for long enough that it seemed like he was expecting something of her. In general she thought his methods of instruction, if that was what they were supposed to be, were probably quite effective — and something her teachers at school could benefit from. Half her friends never seemed to learn anything, but regarded school as something halfway between a social club and a catwalk. Boarding them up under a floor and just talking at them for ever, she thought, might rearrange their priorities. Could be that all that Spanish vocab would just slip right in. Maybe she'd get Mom to suggest it at the next PTA. But really you had to be given something to eat every now and then or you stopped being able to pay attention.

He waited patiently while she went through a coughing fit that seemed to last about an hour. And then he started talking again. This time it was about Stonehenge and so she listened for a while, because Stonehenge was in England and though they hadn't gone there she knew she liked England. England was cool and it had good bands. But when he started on how Stonehenge was only partly an observatory, and mainly a map of human DNA as it was supposed to be, she allowed her attention to drift.

At the end he gave her some more water. The phase during which she had rejected it hadn't lasted very long. Even if she had wished to keep up the defiance, her body simply wouldn't have allowed it. On the third occasion her mouth had opened without her mind having anything to do with it. The water tasted clean and pure and good. She remembered that once it had tasted different from what she was used to. That had been a long time ago.

'Good girl,' the man had said. 'See — you're not being badly treated. I could have pissed on you then and you'd still have had to drink it. Listen to your body. Listen to what's inside.'

'There's nothing inside,' she croaked. And then, for the last time, she had pleaded with him: 'Please. Anything. Even just vegetables. Carrots or cabbage or capers.'

'Still you ask?'

'Please,' she said, her temples feeling as if they were turning to mist. 'I don't feel well and you have to feed me or I'm going to die.'

'You're persistent,' he said. 'It's the one thing that still gives me hope.' He hadn't explicitly denied the request, simply talked about vegetarianism, explaining how it was wrong because human beings had omnivorous dentition and how not eating meat was a result of people spending too much time in their minds, which were infected, and not enough listening to their bodies. Sarah let him drone on. Whatever. Personally, vegetarians bugged her, too, mainly because the ones she knew seemed so superior, like Yasmin Di Planu, who made a big fuss about animal rights the whole time but had the finest collection of shoes in the whole school, the vast majority of them made out of things that had once been able to move about under their own steam and not just because they were strapped around her pretty little feet.

After he'd let her drink this time, he replaced the cover again and went away. During the following two hours Sarah had been completely lucid, which was one of the things that worried her about what had happened next. She knew she had been lucid because she had been thinking about escaping. Not thinking about actually doing it. She seldom imagined that any more, although for a while it had occupied most of her waking thoughts. At first she had pictured suddenly finding the strength to burst up from beneath the floor, like some person who'd been buried too soon and was real pissed at everyone. Then it had been the idea of talking to the man, charming him — she was charming, she knew that; there were boys at school, had been boys, who hung on her every word, not to mention the waiter in the Broadway Deli they'd had one time who came back to the table to check on them, like, far more often than had been strictly necessary, and on this occasion, for once, it hadn't been Sian Williams's attention that one of the penis people was trying to catch — or discussing it rationally with him, or finally even just ordering him to let her out. Each of these had been tried and proved laughably ineffective. In the end it had been fantasies of her father just coming and finding her. She still thought about this sometimes, but not as often as she once had.

Anyway, then she had heard something coming into the room above her. At first she thought it was the man, but then she realized it could not be. It had far too many feet. These feet had walked round and round the room and crisscrossed back and forth directly over her head. Then they had stopped directly above her. There had been sounds like laughter, high-pitched sometimes, but also deep and ragged. It moved back and forth for a while, making unpleasant noises, like grunting and a strange bark, and bits of its body had thudded and other parts had slid with a kind of heavy rasp. Finally a moan, but it didn't sound like it was coming from just one throat, but from several at once, as if the creature had more than one mouth.

It had been still for a while after that, and then it had gone.

Sarah lay with her eyes wide open. This, she knew, was a bad development. Very bad. That had not been the man, or if it had, then he had changed into something. The thing she had heard was what she had most feared, and now it had come in daylight and was no longer biding its time. There could be no doubt.

It had to have been Nokkon Wud himself.

23

Nina left the house early, leaving a note saying she'd call. Zandt spent the morning pacing around the patio. Each morning he woke it was less likely that Sarah Becker was still alive. Knowing this did not open any doors.

He went over the theory he'd presented to Nina, and was unable to find fault with it. He knew it was largely speculation, and understood that he had his own reasons for clinging to the idea. If the man he had killed had been responsible for the abduction of the girls, had snatched them to hand them on to someone he knew would kill them, Zandt believed he would find a way of coming to terms with having killed him. The last two years of solitude had taught ' Zandt one thing, and taught it well: If you can live with yourself, the opinions of others can be withstood. He was aware that The Upright Man probably thought the same, but that didn't change the fact.

Heavy coffee intake and the view gradually turned his hangover into a generic malaise that he could ignore. The kinks in his neck and back from a night on the couch had gone. The sea could do that for you, even at this distance.

At midday he had spiralled indoors in search of food. Nothing in the fridge. Nothing in the cupboards or the freezer. Zandt didn't think he'd met a woman who didn't even have a small pack of cookies in the house, or some bread in the freezer, ready for toasting. It seemed most women would live on toast, if they had the chance. At a loss, he found himself wandering around the living room, looking at the materials on the bookshelves. There were books on serial crimes, both popular and academic; collections of papers on forensic psychology; reams of photocopied case notes, all in folders, organized by state — an outright illegality. A few novels, none of them recent, and most written by people called Harris and Thompson and Connelly and King. Very little that wasn't concerned with the dark side of human behaviour. It looked familiar, from the afternoons he had spent in the house in 1999, hours during which criminology had been the last thing on his mind. He had made his peace with this a long time ago. Jennifer had never found out, and the affair had affected neither what he felt for her nor the outcome of their marriage.

He took down one of the folders of case notes and absently flicked though it. The first section detailed the activities of a man called Gary Johnson, who had raped and murdered six elderly women in Louisiana in the mid-nineties. A note clipped to the front page recorded that Johnson was currently serving six life sentences in a prison Zandt knew would be a hell on earth: a dungeon full of dangerous men whose small seams of affection were usually reserved for their elderly mothers. It would be a miracle, in fact, if Johnson was still alive. One for the good guys. The next section held information about a case in Florida that, at the time of the most recent entries, had been ongoing. Seven young men missing.

One for the killers. One of many.

He took down another folder.

Two hours later he was sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by paper, when there was a knock at the door. He lifted his head, confused. It took another few raps before he realized what the sound was.

He opened the door to find a short man with bad hair standing outside. Behind him was a car that had once been gracious.

'Cab,' the man said.

'I didn't order a cab.'

'I know you didn't. The lady ordered it. She said for me to come here, pick you up. Take you.

Everything very fast. At all times.'

'What lady?' He felt fuzzy, head full of what he'd been reading. Something within it was pulling at him.

The man grunted impatiently and rooted in his pocket. He pulled out a mangled piece of paper and

angled it towards Zandt as he read it. 'Nina is the lady. She say to tell you to hurry. You maybe found something, or she found something, a righteous man — I don't understand that part. But we go now.'

'Where?'

'The airport, man. She said I do this very fast and she give me triple fare, and I need this money so can we leave now, for please?'

'Wait here,' Zandt said. He turned and went back inside. He picked up the phone and dialled Nina's cell phone.

After two rings she answered. There was a lot of background noise, the hectoring, muffled sound of a voice on a public address system.

'What's going on?' he said.

'Are you in the cab?'

Her voice was excited, and for some reason he found this irritating. 'No. What are you doing at LAX?'

'I got a call from the guy I had monitoring the Web. We got a hit on 'The Upright Man'.'

'It's three words, Nina. It could be an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. And presumably the Feds are already on the case.'

'It wasn't a Fed trace,' she admitted, annoyed. 'I did it independently.'

'Right,' Zandt said. 'Figures.'

'He logged the IP address of the computer that made the search, and hacked out the access line of the call. Come on, John. It's the first time this has come up in two years. I never handed in the note you got. As far as the world at large is concerned, he's still called The Delivery Boy.'

There was an explosion of noise from the handset, as someone bellowed another announcement at the other end.

Zandt waited for it to be over, and then said: 'I told Michael Becker.'

'The hit's not from LA,' Nina snapped.

'Where, then. Where?'

'Upstate. Some burg near the border with Oregon. A Holiday Inn.'

'Have you called the local Bureau?'

'The nearest SAC hates me. There's no way he'll send anybody out for me.'

Right, Zandt thought. And in the unlikely event that this turns out to be more than a wild goose chase, you want to be the one making the arrest. Through the door he could see the cab driver still waiting, hopping from foot to foot.

'Too risky, Nina.'

'I'll get some local cops for an escort. Whatever. Look John, there's a plane leaving in forty minutes. I'm going to be on it, and I bought two tickets. Are you coming or not?'

'No,' he said, and put down the phone.

He went back to the door and told the driver he wasn't going anywhere, giving him enough money to make him go away.

Then he swore, grabbed his coat and a handful of files, and was able to throw himself in front of the cab before it left the driveway. He told himself that he had enough on his conscience without adding Nina to it.

That it was nothing to do with wanting to protect her.

24

When I woke at nine the next morning, sprawled over the bed as if dropped from a great height, I found Bobby had left a note on the bedside table. It suggested I meet him in the lobby as early as possible. I showered myself into a semblance of humanity and headed down there, shambling along the corridors like a sloth forced to walk on its hind legs, a sloth well past its best. The night's sleep had made me feel different, though not necessarily better. My thoughts were blurred and sluggish, as if full of crushed ice and an unfamiliar alcoholic drink.

The lobby was mainly empty, just some couple standing over by the desk. Soft music was playing in the background. Bobby was sitting in state in the middle of a long couch, reading the local paper.

'Yo,' I mumbled, when I was standing in front of him.

He looked up. 'You look like shit, my friend.'

'And you're as annoyingly spruce as ever. What's the deal? You climb into an egg each night and emerge reborn? Or is it an exercise thing? Do tell. I want to be just like you.'

Outside the sky was cloudless and bright, and it was all I could to do to stop myself from yelping. I limped across the parking lot behind Bobby, shielding my eyes.

'Your phone's on? And juiced?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Though frankly I don't see the point. Either Lazy Ed hasn't been home, in which case we're wasting our time heading out there, or he has and doesn't want to talk.'

'You are beink very negative, Vard,' Bobby observed in a Germanic accent. 'Hand me the keys. I'll drive.'

'I feel negative,' I said. 'Good thing I've got a happy android for company. But if you use that voice again I'm going to knife you.' I tossed the keys to him.

'Stop right there.' This was said clearly and firmly, and it wasn't Bobby who was talking. We looked at each other, and then turned.

Four people were standing behind us. Two were uniformed cops, locals: one was in his late fifties and trim and lean, the other about thirty years old and a good forty inches around the gut. Off to one side stood a man in a long coat. Standing nearest to us, about ten feet away, was a slim woman in a neat suit. Of the group, she looked easily the most intimidating.

'Put your hands on the top of the car,' she said.

Bobby smiled ominously, and left his hands exactly where they were. 'This would be a joke of some kind?'

'Hands on the fucking car,' the younger cop said. He moved his hand closer to his holster, clearly

itching to use it. Or at least hold it.

'Which one of you is Ward Hopkins?' the woman asked.

'Both of us,' I said. 'Weird cloning thing.'

The young cop abruptly started walking toward us. I put a hand up at chest height, and he walked straight into it.

'Take it easy,' the woman said.

The deputy didn't say anything, but he stopped coming forward, and just glared at me.

'Okay,' I said, keeping my hand in place but not pushing with it. 'Let's not let this get out of hand. Local PD, I take it?'

'That's correct,' the woman said, flipping identification. 'They are. And I'm a federal agent. So be cool, and let's see some hands being put on that car.'

'I don't think so,' said Bobby, still resolutely underwhelmed. 'Guess what? I'm with the Company.'

The woman blinked. 'You're CIA?' she said.

'That's right, ma'am,' he said, with ironic courtesy and a hick accent. 'All we need is some boys from the navy and we could have us a parade.'

There was an awkward moment. The younger cop turned to his older colleague, who in turn raised an eyebrow at the woman. None of them looked as confident as they had a second before. In the background, the man in the coat shook his head.

I decided to let my arm drop. 'He's CIA. I'm not,' I said, electing, for once, to be helpful. 'Just a member of the general public. Called Ward Hopkins. Why are you looking for me?'

'Wait a minute,' Bobby said. He nodded at the younger cop. 'Let's see you take a few steps back, hotshot.'

'Fuck you,' the cop said, equably.

The woman was still looking at me. 'An Internet search was logged yesterday evening,' she said. 'Somebody looking for 'The Upright Man'. Traced back to your account, and to this hotel. We're looking for someone by that name.'

'Not for me?'

'Until last night I had no idea you even existed.'

'So why are you looking for The Upright Man?'

'None of your business,' the younger cop said. 'Ma'am, are you going to arrest these assholes or not?

I'm really not interested in listening to them otherwise.' 'Have it your own way,' I said. 'You can try to take us in, or you can take a walk. If the former, then,

well, you're welcome to try, but really I can't advise it.'

The older cop smiled. 'Are you threatening us, son?'

'No. I'm too gentle for my own good. But Bobby's badly socialized. There's going to be blood all

over this parking lot and none of it ours.'

Coat man spoke for the first time.

'Great,' he said, wearily. 'Six hundred miles to talk to a pair of shitheads.'

The woman ignored him. 'The Upright Man has killed at least four young women, maybe more than

that. At the moment he has one who may still be alive and we don't have very long to find her.'

Bobby stared at her, his mouth slightly open.

'What?' she said. 'Does this mean something to you?'

'You're about to be scammed, Nina,' coat man said. 'You know what spooks are like.'

Bobby came back to earth enough to close his mouth, but not enough to start a fight. The woman

looked at me.

'Tell me,' she said.

'Okay,' I said, 'It could be we need to talk.'

The older cop cleared his throat. 'Ms Baynam, I'm wondering if you really need me and Clyde any

more?'

We got a table by the window in the hotel's excuse for a coffee lounge. The room was large enough, and new-looking, but had all the atmosphere of an empty cookie jar. Bobby and I sat close to the table, with the woman the other side. The guy in the coat — who'd finally been introduced, though only as being LAPD — sat a little distance away, making it clear that in an ideal world he'd be in another state entirely. The local law had already zipped off in their cruiser to eat pancakes and swap tales of how they would have beaten us up given the chance.

I took Bobby's sheaf of paper and laid it in front of the woman.

'If you want to know why we were searching for The Upright Man,' I said, 'then this is it. Actually we've been looking for something else. But this is what we found.'

She quickly read through the three sheets of paper. When she got to the end she handed the papers

to the other guy.

'So what were you looking for?' she asked.

'A group of people called The Straw Men,' I said. 'Bobby traced a Web site that led to this.

Searching for 'The Upright Man' was the logical next step. That's all we know.'

'This is agency business?'

'No,' I said. 'It's personal.'

'There was a LINKS button at the bottom of the last sheet,' she said. 'What did that lead to?'

'What button?' I said.

'I found it after you crashed out,' Bobby said, looking sheepish. 'Hidden in a chunk of crashed Java

code. Should have spotted it earlier.'

'And where did it go?'

'Serial killers,' he said, and at that the man in the coat looked up. 'Just fan sites. Pages of stuff about

guys who kill, laboriously typed up by dweebs without the ambition to become real dangers to society.'

'Could you show me the first page again?' the woman asked.

He shook his head. 'It's gone. I checked back ' when I was done looking at fuzzy pictures of wackos.

File no longer on the server, presumably moved somewhere else.'

'You didn't bookmark the pages it linked to?'

Bobby shrugged. 'I didn't see any reason to. All I had was guys with paranoid delusions and a

hard-on for serial killers.'

'It's a leak,' the coat guy said, handing the papers back to the woman. 'Fan sites is right. That's all this is. Somehow The Delivery Boy's real name got out, and some psycho wannabe has set this shit up using his name. An interactive experience for people who want to drool over killer stats, complete with spooky moving site address. The net is full of this shit. Cannibal clubs slung up by fucks who can't earn a five-star badge working at McDonald's.'

I stared at him: 'The Delivery Boy?'

'That's what the press called the man we're looking for.'

'Jesus,' I said. 'You're still looking for that guy?'

'And will be until he's dead. Nina, I'm going for a cigarette. Then I suggest we head back to

civilization.'

He got up and walked out of the room.

'He means 'apprehended',' the woman said, quietly, after he was gone. 'Apprehended is what he

meant.'

'Yeah, right,' Bobby said. 'You ask me, that's someone who needs keeping on a very tight lead.'

'What's the deal with these Straw Men?' she said.

'Tell her, Bobby,' I said, standing up.

'Take it very easy,' Bobby said, pointing a finger at me. 'And remember what I just said.'

I left them and walked out into the lobby. I could see the guy in the coat standing a few yards outside

the main doors.

'You got a cigarette?'

He looked at me for a long moment, then reached into his pocket. When I was lit, we stood in silence

for a while.

'You're that cop, aren't you?' I asked eventually. He didn't reply. 'Right?'

'I was a cop,' he said. 'Not any more.

'Maybe so. But I was living in San Diego at the time. I read the news. There was one cop in

particular, someone who was supposed to be a serial killer hotshot. Didn't catch him, then dropped out of sight. That would be you, I'm thinking.'

'Seems like you remember a lot about the case,' he said. 'Sure you don't have a vested interest? Maybe you're looking to see how many fans you got. Checking you're still a celebrity.'

'You thought I was him, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So don't jerk me around.'

He took a last drag of his cigarette, and then flicked it across the lot. 'So what are you doing?'

'I'm looking for the people who killed my parents,' I said.

He looked at me. 'These The Straw Men you mentioned?'

'I think so. What I don't know is if they're connected to the man you're looking for.'

'They're not,' he said, glaring out across the lot. 'This whole thing is bullshit and a waste of time we don't have.'

'Your friend doesn't seem to think so. Frankly, I don't care. But it seems to me that inside that hotel we've got two people who are connected to law enforcement agencies. Who can get things done. On the other hand, we've got you and me, who are currently connected to dick. We can stand outside and piss into each other's tents, or we can see where this leads and try not to get too much in each other's faces.'

He thought a moment. 'Good enough.'

'So what's your name, dude?'

'John Zandt.'

'Ward Hopkins,' I said, and we shook on it, and walked back into the hotel.

At the door to the restaurant my cell phone went off. I waved Zandt on and clucked back into the

lobby. I paused a second before hitting the connect button, trying to work out the right way to sound to an

old guy who was running scared. I couldn't work out how that might be. All I could do was listen to what he had to say. And not shout at him, probably.

I answered the call and listened, but it wasn't him. I had a brief conversation, and then thanked someone. I put my phone away.

When I walked into the restaurant they were all sitting round the table, Zandt more in the loop this time. The woman looked up at me, but it was to Bobby that I spoke.

'Just got a call,' I said.

'Lazy Ed?'

'No. Girl from the hospital.'

'Yeah, and, so?'

'She spent the afternoon yesterday chasing down records.'

'You must have really made an impression.' I didn't reply, so he added: 'You going to tell what she found?'

'She traced both my parents back to their hometowns,' I said. 'Neither of which were the ones I had been given to believe.'

My voice was a little cracked. Zandt turned round to look at me.

'I didn't get as far as this bit,' Bobby said. 'But there's a sibling Ward's parents didn't get around to telling him about.'

'I don't think they really told me much at all. Much that was true, anyhow.' I was aware of the woman's eyes still on me; that, and how Hunter's Rock and everything I had thought I'd known now seemed like a favourite story I had been read, time and time again, but of which I could now remember only the title.

'What is it?' the woman asked.

'My mother couldn't have children.'

'Any more?' Bobby said. 'After you?'

'No. Any at all.'

25

They came with us out to the bar. Young Ed wasn't fulsome in his greeting, and said only that he hadn't seen the old guy and still had no idea where he might be. He continued to say this even after Zandt had taken him to one side. I couldn't hear what the ex-cop was saying, but Ed's body language was enough to convince me that Zandt's conversational style was compelling.

'Your man is very keen to catch this killer,' I observed to Nina.

She looked away. 'You have no idea.'

Zandt eventually turned from the barman, who quickly slipped back behind the safety of his counter.

'We're wasting our time out here,' Zandt said, as we followed him back out into the parking lot. 'No offence to you guys, but I don't see how an old wino is going to help Nina and me in what we're looking for. Maybe it's relevant to you, but it's not getting us any closer to anything and Sarah is getting closer to death with every minute we waste.'

'So what do you want to do, John?' the woman asked. 'Head back to LA and sit on our butts there instead?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Actually that's exactly what I want to do. I wasn't just pulling my wire at your house. I think…' He shook his head.

She frowned. 'What?'

'I'll tell you on the plane,' he muttered.

'Hey,' I said. 'I'll give you a little privacy.'

I walked away from them to where Bobby was standing, near to our car. 'Think the party's going to

break up,' I said.

'So what's our plan?'

'Walk the streets, check the bars and diners and library and places where people hang out. Do it

professionally. This isn't New York. There's a limit to how many places he can hide.'

'You knew this guy once. You got no clue where he might go?'

'I didn't really know him,' I said, turning to look back at the bar. 'I went in there and drank as a teenager. We passed the time of day and he served me alcohol. That's all.'

I remembered once again the evening my father had come to the bar with me, and the way Ed had given me a beer afterward, and I'd felt a little disloyal. I now realized there could have been some subtext in that night's events, something I'd missed back then. The beer Ed shoved toward me, with rough kindness — it could have just been a generic gesture, but I didn't think so now. Lazy Ed hadn't really been the type. Hadn't he actually been saying, 'Yeah, I know what the guy can be like?' If so, it implied even more strongly that Ed might have been the man running the camera in the first half of the middle section of the video, that he had been the one passed out and used as a candleholder. It also made it even stranger that, confronted with each other over a decade later, they'd given absolutely no indication that they knew each other. Something must have happened in Hunter's Rock, something that broke up a group of friends; but somehow caused three of them to get together again, a thousand miles away, once again pretending to outsiders that there was nothing between them. Nothing old, anyway, nothing in the past.

Even to me they'd made that pretence, but now it was looking as if that made perfect sense. If my mother couldn't have children, then who the hell was I?

Behind the bar the sky was opaque, making the trees look jagged and cold. It may have been that, or the smell of the pine on the cold air, that took me back so clearly to that night. Smells can do that, more so even than sights and sounds, as if the oldest parts of our mind, the ones that lock us in time and memory, still navigate through traces of scent.

'Hang on a minute,' I said, a faint light coming on in the back of my mind. I shut my eyes, chased the thought down. Something Lazy Ed had been talking about in that year, the kind of project that sounded

like the fantasy of a man who wasn't well known for even keeping his bar surfaces clean.

Finally I got it. 'There's somewhere else we could try.'

'Let's do it,' Bobby said.

I looked over to the other two. I could see that in Zandt's head they were already at the departure

gate. The woman looked less certain. I made the decision for them. This was a long shot, and not one I had the time or patience to explain to other people.

'Good luck,' I called. Then I got in our car and Bobby and I drove away.

The Lost Pond isn't lost, of course. It's about a mile walk into the forest that stretches north from Hunter's Rock: national land, not much used except by locals and a few hikers. It was a place you'd be taken on trips from school, out into the wilds to learn about bugs and stuff — a bus out to the fringe of the forest, and then a trek among trees through shuffling leaves, pleased to be out of the classroom. The teachers would try to keep everyone's mind on why they were there, but not too assiduously: you could tell from the looseness in their shoulders that they, too, were happy to be free of the usual boundaries. I remember seeing one of them pick up a small rock once, when he thought none of us was looking, and hurl it some distance at a fallen tree. He hit it, and smiled a private smile. That may have been the first time I realized that — contrary to appearances — teachers must be people, too.

When you got older you weren't taken out there any more. Lessons became focused on stuff you could memorize, not experience. But occasionally kids would go out there for the hell of it, and this was when the reason for the name would become apparent. Didn't matter how many times you'd been crocodiled out there with thirty yapping peers, if you tried to find it on your own or with a couple of friends, it never seemed to be where you thought it was. You'd walk into the banks of trees, quietly confident, and within a few hundred yards the track would have disappeared. A small creek ran diagonally away into the small hills, and most people would make it that far. You'd follow the creek until you came to the place where it joined a larger one, and from that point every decision you made would be wrong. Didn't matter how well you thought you remembered the route, how much you all agreed it had to be this way; a couple hours later you'd be back in the parking lot, thirsty and dog tired and just glad to be out again while it was still light and without having seen any bears.

Except for me. I went to the trouble, one summer when I didn't have a lot else to do, of learning where the pond was. I would have been fifteen, I think, a couple of years before the night in the bar with my father. I applied scientific method, which I was very impressed with at the time. I methodically worked through all of the route alternatives until I'd found where the pond was — and how to get there. I got very lost a few times, but it wasn't a bad way of spending a few weeks. When you know where you're going, a forest is a nice place to be. It feels safe, and you feel special. The problem was, once I'd successfully made the journey maybe ten times, I realized I'd ruined it for myself. There's no point in a lost pond that isn't lost. It becomes just a pond, and I stopped going. By that time I was getting more interested in knowing about places to go necking, and you couldn't get a girl to go walking in the forest after dark — certainly not in search of some patch of water that you might or might not be able to find. That's not the kind of thing that appeals to most girls. Or I didn't. One or the other.

Bobby and I were walking in single file, following a tributary of the creek. It had been over twenty years, and the environment had twisted and changed. The cover overhead was patchy, and cold shafts of sun came down to throw shadows.

We soon came to another intersection in the creek network, steep banks where it had cut down deep into the earth. I stopped at the top of one of the banks, momentarily unsure. The area didn't look familiar. There was some muttering in the ranks.

'And we're doing this because the guy said that he was considering putting up a hunting shelter, about… oh, twenty years ago?'

'You can go home now if you want.'

'Without my faithful native tracker?'

After another slow look around, I understood the way the vegetation had changed. One of the trees I had used for a marker had fallen down in the intervening years. Some time ago, too: the remains were moss-covered and rotten. I reoriented myself and headed into the gully.

The sides were steep and slick with leaves, and we were careful on the way down. When I reached the bottom I turned left and took us along the slight incline.

'We're nearly there,' I said, pointing up the way. About two hundred yards ahead, the gully banked steeply to the right. 'I think it's just around that kink.'

Bobby didn't say anything, and I assumed that, like me, he'd become absorbed into the experience. Forests are one of those things that you lose for a while, until you have your own kids and start to

appreciate certain things again, see them reborn through a child's eyes — like ice cream and toy cars and squirrels. I spent some time considering if this had something to do with why I liked hotels. Their corridors are like routes between trees, their bars and restaurants like little clearings for assembly and eating. Nests of varying size and prestige, all held within the same structure, a private forest.

The Upright Man's manifesto had gotten into my head more than I'd realized.

'Somebody's watching us,' Bobby said.

'Where?'

'Don't know,' he said, glancing up at the sides of the gully above us. 'But he's up there somewhere.'

'I don't see anyone,' I said, keeping my eyes forward. 'But I'll take your word for it. So what do we

do?'

'Keep walking,' Bobby said. 'If it's him, he's either going to wig out or stay put and make a decision on whether to come talk. He sticks his head far enough above the parapet, I'll go after him.'

We covered the last hundred yards quietly, resisting the urge to look up. At the turn in the gully the floor rose sharply, and we scrambled up a couple of feet.

And there, in front of us, was the Lost Pond. Maybe a hundred yards by sixty, steeply banked for the most part, but with a couple of muddy little beaches. A few ducks floated in the middle, and trees overhung much of the shallow water. I walked up to the edge and looked into it. It was like looking in a

mirror and seeing myself as I was when I was fifteen.

'You know where the hide was?' Bobby asked.

'All I know is that he was planning one. He mentioned it twice, maybe three times. Not to hunt. Just

somewhere to hang. Ed was a bigtime loner.'

'Plus a pervert, maybe?'

'No.' I shook my head. 'No one comes out here to make out. It's kind of spooky at night.'

He looked around, checking out the terrain. 'If I was going to put up a shelter, I'd do it over there.' He pointed at an area of trees and thick brush that extended over the slope on the west side of the pond. 'Prospect- and refuge-wise.'

I led the way round the pond, peering ahead to where Bobby had indicated. Could have been my imagination, but it did look as if an area in the middle was thicker than the rest, as if materials had been gathered and heaped up.

It was then that the first shot rang out. A sharp crack, following a whiz and then a whine.

Bobby yanked me back from the edge of the pond and started running. Another shot swished through the leaves a couple of feet above us. When we were behind the trunks I twisted my head round, trying to

see where the shots were coming from.

'What is with this guy?'

'Wait,' I said. 'Look over there.'

I pointed at the thicker area of undergrowth. A head was now poking out of the brush — the head of

an old man, one who was nowhere near the place the shots were coming from.

'Shit,' Bobby said, a gun now in his hand. Two men in fatigues were running down the side toward the pond. Another man in denim was approaching from the other side.

'That's the guy from the bar last night,' I said. 'The one who boxed us in.'

The men in khaki had reached the opposite side of the pond. The larger of the two dropped to a kneeling position, and fired directly at the stand of trees: measured, unhurried shots. The other was heading fast round the other side of the pond, banking it high to get round the top. Denim man was also shooting.

'Who the fuck are these guys?'

'Bobby — one's heading around toward Ed.'

'I'm on it,' he said. 'Let's have some cover.' He sprinted off. I pulled my gun, stepped out from the

side of the tree, and started firing.

The kneeling man executed a neat roll to the side and slipped behind the remains of a large fallen tree. I cut sideways through the trees. I was shooting into cold and slanting light, flickered across my face by the uprights of twisted trees, half my mind on avoiding roots so I didn't go flying. Within ten seconds there was a cry, and the denim man spun around and fell onto his back.

Bobby was ploughing into the undergrowth ahead, firing at the guy coming down the rise, having cut up around in the high ground. The man was ignoring Bobby and me altogether, despite the fact that

Bobby was firing at him; he was concentrating on shooting at Lazy Ed's shelter.

I stopped, steadied, and fired.

The first bullet hit him in the shoulder. One from Bobby followed half a second later, and the man was

punched backward against a tree. But he kept shooting, and still not at us.

I fired again, twice, getting him plumb in the chest. Bobby had stopped running too now, and three shots of his followed. The man disappeared from sight.

I took a step forward but Bobby flapped a hand back at me, indicating that I should stay where I

was. He moved ahead cautiously.

'Ed?' I called. 'Are you okay?'

Suddenly the man in khaki came into view again. He'd slid a little way down the hill, under cover of the undergrowth. As Bobby and I watched, astounded, he pushed himself to his knees, still holding what I now saw was a machine pistol.

Before I could think of moving, the man started firing again. He was dying in front of our eyes, but he had time to put maybe another fifteen shells into the undergrowth. He didn't consider taking us down. It was like we weren't even there.

Then he slumped forward onto his face and was quiet for ever.

Bobby turned on his heel and doubled back, reloading. I ran forward, kicked the dead guy over to check, and shoved my way into the undergrowth.

Right in the middle were the remains of a hide. A loose collection of weathered wood, dry brush, twisted old branches. Unless you were looking for it, you'd probably think it was natural, at most the remains of something from long ago, rather than something a man had put together for shelter because he just liked sitting out in the woods and looking down at a pond. Lying in the middle of it was Lazy Ed.

I knelt beside him and knew that he wouldn't be leaving the forest. You couldn't count the holes. His

face was least affected, though one ear was gone and you could see the bone.

'What's going on, Ed?' I said. 'What the fuck is happening? Why is someone killing all of you?'

Ed swivelled his head an inch or so, looked up at me. It was hard to see the man I'd once slightly

known, among the wrinkles and burst blood vessels.

'Fuck you,' he rasped, quite clearly. 'You and your fucking family.'

'My family is dead.'

'Good,' he said, and died.

There was nothing to find in the shelter. A few empty cans, a stash of tobacco, a half-full bottle of very cheap tequila. I thought about closing Ed's eyes and then didn't. Instead I turned round and walked back out of the bush.

By the time I reached the pond, and the body of the man in denim, Bobby was heading back down a hillock toward me.

'Got away,' he muttered.

'He looked like he knew what he was doing. You okay?'

'Yeah, except I nearly got lost on the way back.'

'It's a lost pond,' I said. My hands were shaking. 'Jesus.'

'They dealt the play,' he said. 'We weren't looking for this.'

'I know,' I said, overcome with the bizarreness of being back in a childhood environment, this time with a gun. 'But what difference does that make? Someone will always be shooting somebody.'

Bobby squatted down next to the denim man's body and felt through his pockets until he found a wallet. He flipped through it in front of me. There was no driver's licence, no stamps, no receipts, no photos — none of the standard wallet detritus. Nothing except for about forty dollars.

'Did you look at the other dead guy?'

'Only for long enough to make sure he wasn't going to start shooting again,' I said. 'He was wearing a vest, but I'm still impressed at how long he kept going. That guy showed real dedication to his task. Which was nothing to do with us. They could have taken us out easily. They were after Lazy Ed. We were just in the way.'

Bobby nodded. 'There was no identification on him either,' I said. 'At all. I turned back the collar of

his sweater, and looked in the back of his pants. No labels. They'd been cut out.'

'It's The Straw Men,' he said. 'They're taking them out one by one.'

'But why? And how did they find us?'

He shrugged. 'The Fed chick did. Maybe they did it the same way. It's their Web page: they'd have

immediate notification of any access, without waiting for some hacker to intercept it. Or they could have been on the case before we were, Ward. There's evidence that some sort of cleanup is in operation.'

He looked up at me, looking tired and pissed off with our failure. 'Either way they got the job done. There's nothing left for us here except trouble, and we already got enough of that.'

Without another word we started walking.

26

Nina had assumed Zandt would explain to her what was on his mind, but from the moment the other two guys had left, he'd clammed up. When he'd turned up at LAX in the cab, though he hadn't been particularly friendly, he had at least seemed to be present. As soon as they'd established that the men at the Holiday Inn in Hunter's Rock — whatever they might have been up to, and she still had questions about that — were nothing to do with The Upright Man, it was like he'd retreated again. She felt stupid about hauling them upstate, but making a mistake was better than doing nothing. She was very aware of the passage of time, aware of it as acutely as if someone was pulling her skin off her face. In her it bred a desire to talk, to try to do or say something, anything, almost as if they could vocalize a solution into existence. In Zandt it seemed to have the opposite effect. It would not be long, she believed, before he became utterly mute.

The plane was mostly empty and yet he hadn't even sat next to her. He was across the row, studying some old files he'd taken from the house. She called the office in Brentwood, and established that nothing had changed there, while not making it clear that she wasn't exactly just around the corner.

Then she turned back to the window, and stared down at the land passing below as they flew over it back to LA, wondering if they were passing over the very place, the hidden house or cabin, whatever The Upright Man called his own. The knowledge that they might be, that Sarah Becker might be under her somewhere, was impossible to bear. Instead she yanked the in-flight magazine out of the pouch and tried very hard to read it.

Zandt was barely aware he was on a plane, and he wasn't even thinking about Sarah Becker. Instead he was considering four disappearances, spread over the country in a three-year period. There was little to tie them together except that copies of the case files were now on his lap. But if there was some kind of brokering service, the usual rules of serial investigation might no longer apply. If you had a series of disappearances or bodies within a tightly confined geographical area, it was a fair assumption you could limit the search for evidence or corollary events to within that same space. Most killers had their hunting grounds, a few square miles in which they were confident. Some would limit their field of activity to a few blocks, even a couple of streets — especially if preying on sections of society that didn't inspire committed interest from the authorities. Zandt remembered watching footage of the demolishing of the house that had held Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, the place where young black and Asian men had been dismembered, worshipped, and eaten, in one order or another. Families of the victims watched the event, most mutely, some merely sobbing — but a few demanding an explanation from anyone who would listen, trying to elicit some reason to accept the fact that their children had been taken from them and murdered without anyone seeming to care very much.

Disappearances on opposite sides of the country were seldom judged against each other, even after the FBI became involved, especially if they took place within a similar time frame. You didn't snatch someone from San Francisco on Tuesday night and then grab another in Miami in the small hours of Thursday morning.

Not, at least, if the same man was involved. Zandt had been looking for disappearances that shared characteristics with those connected with The Upright Man, and that also had taken place in the same years. He was not expecting to find other instances of little keepsakes with a girl's names embroidered on each of them. The Upright Man was clever enough to seek to imply that the LA cases were unconnected with any in other parts of the country.

This was the realization that had been nagging at him when the cab had arrived to take him to LAX: that the sweaters were showy. That they might have little or nothing to do with the killer's pathology, and instead be a way of fencing off a small group of cases by making them appear unrelated to anything else. That The Upright Man might have judged that the police were as likely to be impressed by such a touch as were the audiences for films where chrysalises were left in corpses' throats, or TV series where each week a man caught killers who wore their innermost psychoses on their sleeve. You got a sweater with a name on it, it's one of ours. You haven't, then it isn't, and we're not interested in hearing about it. Our guy's got a pathology. That's what we're looking for. It's one of the few tools we've got, we're sticking by it and can't you see how busy we are already?

Zandt believed it was all too possible that The Upright Man might not have a pathology at all, that he might not be susceptible to profiling. He could be out there doing it, taking victims culled from anywhere in the country. Maybe even anywhere in the world. Just because he wanted to.

The subjects did not constitute a clearly distinguishable group. We covet beauty because beauty makes people recognizable, makes them look famous. Zandt did not consider the long hair to be a reliable indicator either. If he was right in thinking that the sweaters were a false trail, then the length of the girl's hair might simply be a means to an end. There were only two distinguishing features. The first

was age. Many young children disappear, and a number of old men and women are battered in their homes. Both unwittingly put themselves in the path of statistics by virtue of their physical weakness. Of the remainder, the majority of women who disappear are in their late teens or early twenties: sufficiently young (and not too old) to have independent lives; women who can be found walking home late at night, who might live alone, who have the youthful confidence to come to the aid of an affable man with his arm in a sling and his face just in shadow in the corner of a parking lot late at night. Women of all ages disappear, but the big spike in the graph came in this range. The Upright Man's known victims, however, along with the missing girls in the files on his lap, had been in their middle teens. Girls who were old enough to present a physical challenge to their abductor, but too young to often be found in the most vulnerable environments. This didn't mean that Zandt could simply batch any girl between the ages of fourteen and sixteen and call them possibles. There were plenty of places all over the country where a girl of that age might well be out on the street at night, plying a trade. If The Upright Man or his procurer had been concerned with age alone, he could have driven a truck to the right part of the right town and loaded it up to standing-room only. Instead he selected not only from a group who were circumstantially less vulnerable than average because of their age, but who also came from social backgrounds that mitigated against easy availability. Elyse Le-Blanc's family had been a little less well-off than the others, but still firmly middle class. The rest were verging on wealthy. The Upright Man wasn't just looking for meat. He was looking for what he perceived to be quality.

Zandt sat, staring at the reproduced pictures of the dead girls. His mind seemed to revolve faster and faster, mixing the facts in front of him in with the ones he had internalized two years before. The places, the names, the faces. He tried to see it all as one, removing only his own family and daughter, who he was now convinced had only been chosen as a lesson to him. Zandt had tried removing Karen from the equation before, but had never been able to. An awareness of her disappearance had coloured everything he had thought and done from the moment he and Jennifer found the note outside their door. But now he substituted her with the girls in the new files, trying to sense whether they were connected by anything other than speculation. Trying to reach out from the place where he was headed, where he had lived most of his life, the strange city of dream-makers, of poverty and test screenings and murder and money — to other places, other nights, other hunting grounds. To other cities, other machines, forests of buildings and rivers of concrete where other men and women missed the stars at night and tended small plants on window sills and kept tiny dogs to take for walks along corridors in the endless procession of boxes and intersections and lights; where they rented space in other people's property so they had somewhere to sleep so they could get up and perform profit-related tasks they neither understood nor cared about, simply so they would be given the tokens of exchange they needed in order to rent the space in which they slept and snarled and watched television until finally some of them slipped out of their windows and ran howling down the dark streets, throwing off a numbness handed down from a society that was itself trapped in fracture and betrayal and despair; the lonely insane in a culture turning into a Christmas bauble, gaudy beauty wrapped around an emptiness which was coalescing faster and faster into parking lots and malls and waiting areas and virtual chatrooms — non-places where nobody knew anything about anybody any more. Abruptly the whirling stopped.

27

It was growing dark by the time we got back to the hotel room. There were two messages for Bobby. While he called people back I turned the TV on with the sound muted, watched the local news channel out of a grim interest in seeing how long it took the story to break. The chances were that there would have been hikers in earshot, who would eventually find the bodies. Though there was nothing to tie us to the event, I wanted us out of Hunter's Rock fast.

I walked quickly round the room, packing up my few bits and pieces.

'Christ,' Bobby said, his voice harsh and strange. I turned to see him still on the phone. 'Turn the television on.'

'It is on.'

'Not local shit. CNN or something.'

I flipped through the channels until I found it.

The footage was hand-held and shaky. A big grey building in some urban environment. A school. It

had obviously been filmed earlier in the day, because it was still light.

'We got it,' Bobby said into the phone. 'I'll call you back.'

I flipped the mute off, and we listened as the voice-over put the death toll at thirty-two, with many still missing and half the building still unsearched. It was unclear whether the two pupils shot by police had been solely responsible for the atrocity, or whether a third individual had been involved. Rifles and a large home-made incendiary device had been involved.

The camera roved around the devastation, catching glimpses of knots of children and teachers, faces shocked white in the lamp glare. The ambient sound was down in the mix, but you could still hear the sirens and sobbing. A woman staggered past, supported on both sides by paramedics, her face entirely covered in blood.

'Where is this?'

'Evanston, Maine.' Bobby closed his eyes.

The TV cut to live footage. The scene was calmer now, all but a few bystanders held back from the school by incident tape. A man in a tan coat held a microphone, flicker-lit by blue flashing lights. Two additional bodies had been found. Jane Mathews and Frances Lack, both eleven years of age.

Back to earlier footage. Fire trucks, ambulances. Wounded people, both children and adults, lying on the ground, being attended to. Others on the ground with no one holding their hand. People to whom no one could make a difference any more.

'Holy fuck,' I said, pointing at the screen. The camera panned along the street opposite the school, at people standing watching the gate to hell that had been opened. Amongst them was a tall blond man with a large shoulder bag, caught from behind. Unusually, he was not craning to get a better view, like everyone around him, but was standing calm and still. The cameraman didn't notice him, and passed on along the line, a slow pan of appalled shock.

'I've seen that guy before,' I said.

A blond man, at The Halls, with a blue shoulder bag.

Bobby spent a chunk of the flight on the phone. I overheard him talking to three different people, arranging for tapes to be couriered to Dyersburg airport. Then he sat quiet and stared into his complimentary coffee for a while.

I looked at him. 'They're sure it's just these kids?'

'Their homes are being turned upside down as we speak, but nothing's come up so far. Isn't some global hatred thing this time. This was the handiwork of two well-adjusted young Americans, so far as anyone can tell. The mood in general is not buoyant.'

I could believe this. The atmosphere among the other travellers was subdued, and even the pilot's

'Well, here we are on board' speech had been extremely muted.

'I didn't hear you telling anyone about what happened to us today.'

He laughed harshly. 'Right. 'Hey, we just killed a couple guys in the woods, and when we got back to the hotel this friend of mine saw another guy on TV he thinks he recognizes'? This is not high concept, Ward, and you are not exactly remembered fondly. The Agency's cleaned itself up a little, my friend. They'd throw me out even more happily than they did you.

'They didn't throw me out. I walked.'

'One step ahead of a polygraph subpoena.'

'Whatever,' I snapped. 'Bobby, that was the guy.'

'You said you barely saw him up there. You admitted you didn't see his face.'

'I know. But it was him.'

'I believe you,' he said, and suddenly he looked serious. 'Weird thing, I thought I knew him, too.'

'What? Where from?'

'Don't know. Christ, by the time I saw what you were pointing at he was gone. But there was

something familiar about him.'

It was dark by the time we landed. The car I'd left in the airport lot was gone, presumably retrieved by its rental firm. Bobby went to the other desk and got us a new vehicle. All they had was a very large

Ford. I fetched it from their lot and swung around to wait by the main exit.

Bobby eventually came out of the terminal with a small box under his arm.

'Cool,' he said tersely, as he climbed in the front. 'Room for the kids and a whole week's shopping.

Let's go find us a Publix.'

'Least we can sleep in it if we have to.'

'I'm not even going to think about that.'

'You're getting soft, soldier.'

'Yes I am, and that means I don't have to eat broccoli any more, to paraphrase an esteemed former

president.'

'Esteemed by whom?'

'His mother.'

Bobby still had the keys to the room he'd taken at the Sacagawea. After checking that it didn't seem to be occupied by anybody else, he went off to negotiate with the management.

I hunted down a couple of cans of iced tea and then let myself back into the room. It brought to mind long-ago vacations even more strongly than the pool at the motel outside Hunter's Rock. Fifty or more years of people briefly inhabiting the same space, camping out in the middle of a journey. The chair I sat in could once have held someone watching Gilligan's Island broadcast for the first time, to whom the tune was not a hot-wired piece of race memory. One day someone else might sit there, in their silicon-enhanced space-clothes sipping a no-sugar, no-caffeine, no-flavour moon drink, and think the

same thing of Friends: 'Hey — look at all the skinny people. And what was the deal with the hair?'

Bobby returned with a massive VCR under his arm.

'Old fool hadn't even noticed I'd left,' he said. 'Though he was sharp enough over a deposit for this

piece of archaeology. I think you may actually have to wind it up.'

Once the machine was connected to the room's near-collectible television, Bobby perched on the end of the bed and ripped open the package he'd picked up at the airport. Inside were a couple of VHS

tapes. He quickly checked the labels, and stuck one of them inside the machine.

'This is unedited,' he explained, as he pressed the PLAY button. 'Viewer discretion is advised.'

The cameraman had arrived at the scene of the school bombing very soon after the initial explosion.

In most of America's big cities there's a market for freelance news crews, two-person units who roam the city like ownerless dogs. They scan official radio bands and often get to the jumpers and pileups and bullet-scarred bars ahead of the cops, in search of freak-show footage to help the networks and cable channels fulfil their ever-expanding screen-minute quota. Something about the quality of the camerawork suggested this kind of provenance, though I could have been wrong. Confronted with these scenes it's possible my own hands wouldn't have been too steady either. When you see atrocities on television it's easy to forget that — in spite of the impression of verity — the news has already been sanitized for our protection. We watch people standing round mass graves in Bosnia and the rough-and-ready quality of the footage helps us forget that we're not being shown what's inside, or what those dusty fragments mean to the people who are actually there, rather than watching safely through a thick piece of glass in a living room on the other side of the world. Even the wall-to-wall coverage of the World Trade Center horror steered clear of showing us what the emergency services saw. We're so used to being edited, so infected with the sleight of hand of the media, that we're more aware of what's been added than of what has been taken away. It doesn't matter how many 'making of advertumentaries we watch, the latex monster will still scare us in context: and when watching the news we do not question why the pan ended at a particular moment, what was splattered across the frame we did not see. It's soft-core news, set up without the money shot. We're allowed to hear the screams, but at an acceptable and contextualized volume — all the while listening to a voice whose sombre outrage is in itself a kind of reassurance. 'This is wrong,' the voice implicitly tell us. 'This is bad. But it is rare, and it will be made better. This will pass, and in the end it will all be okay.'

This video had no voice-over. No cuts had been made. It said nothing. It merely showed.

The single explosion had ripped the front off of a squat, two-storey municipal building. In doing so it had sent tons of concrete, glass and metal flying out from a central point at very high speeds. These materials had interacted with others of their kind, and also with much softer substances. A great deal of this material had been blown clear to rain down outside. When the cameraman arrived — along with a sound technician whose appalled exclamations were audible at regular intervals — he had simply stumbled through the parking lot in front of the school, taking a curved path through the devastation. Occasionally he had whip-panned across to the outbuilding to his right, or to the other side of the lot as the police and ambulances began to arrive. But for the most part the camera merely recorded what was in front of its lens.

A girl who was apparently unaware of the fact she had lost an arm, and was running, screaming out someone's name. Parts of bodies, and heads. A young boy whose face was so covered in blood that he looked newborn, wandering through the smoke making a mewling sound. A long stretch of chunks of flesh, like a giant pile of bloody vomit, with a few identifiable features and body parts spread amongst it. Most of an older man, lying on the ground and twitching, all of his facial features burnt away and nothing left except a pink mass where a hole gaped in mute purposelessness. Half of an attractive young woman, her eyes open, nothing below the rib cage except a stump of spine and the hood of the car she had landed on.

Gradually the quality of the background sound began to change, as the most urgent screams died out and the sobbing and shouting climbed in volume to take its place. Slowly a semblance of order began to affect the people in the camera's gaze. Aimless movement was replaced by more directed activity, as society's white blood cells moved in and tried to impose a structure. Some of these men and women

moved with purpose: pointing, shouting, bandaging. Others might as well have been victims themselves.

And then we saw him.

By this point the news crew had seen enough of the hardcore, and had gravitated out toward where the parking lot fed into an accessway onto the street. The soundman had been sick twice, the cameraman once. The crowd opposite the entrance to the lot had not yet had time to gather, but incident tape was already going up, fencing the event out of our reality, consigning it to exceptional circumstances.

The man was already there, however, standing more or less where I had spotted him earlier. Tall, with short blond hair, standing with his feet planted solidly on the ground. Looking out over the devastation, gazing up at the plume of smoke generated by a fire that at this point was nowhere near under control. Bobby hit PAUSE.

The man was not smiling. I don't want to give that impression. The picture jumped all over the place, and it was impossible to make out the detail of his face. He was merely watching.

Neither of us said anything. Bobby reached for his iced tea, tried to take a swig from it, realized he hadn't popped the can. He did so; swallowed half of it.

'Okay,' he said quietly. 'The rest is a long shot.' He ejected the tape, unconsciously handling it as if it might be contaminated. He stuck the other tape in the machine and pressed PLAY.

'Got this from one of the technicians in media analysis,' he said. 'It's for internal consumption, a reminder to people in Washington. A marketing tool. Footage of certain things that have happened in the last ten-fifteen years, continually updated.'

The first sequence showed material I recognized quickly, having been exposed to it in short doses for much of the last week. It was the aftermath of the shooting in England. The lighting was harsh, early-morning glare. The camera was rock steady, presumably the work of some well-trained BBC guy. Clumps of people holding each other. Medics clustered around a door from which bodies were carried, some covered in sheets, others merely in blood. A couple of other well-behaved news crews. A ring of policemen around the intersection of two busy roads. There was little shouting or crying. The main sound was of traffic going past: people late for meetings, coming back from the gym, on their way to deliver litres of Diet Coke.

We didn't have to wait for long, but the shot was blurred and inconclusive. A pan across the chain fence, from the inside, showing people gathering outside. Amongst them a tall man, with fair hair. Bobby froze the tape, ran it back and forth. The face was too small, and the pan was too fast.

'It's him,' I said, nonetheless.

Over the next two hours we watched the rest, a tapestry of death stitched with points of light. I lost count after a while, but at least thirty episodes of mass murder were paraded in front of us, until the differences between them — the places, the sounds, the changes in clothing over more than a decade — seemed transparent in the face of the similarities. In most we saw nothing we could point to, but in a few we saw something close enough that we were prepared to add it to the list Bobby began on a piece of hotel stationery:

A food court in Panama City, Florida, 1996. A main street in northern France, 1989. A shopping mall in D|sseldorf, 1994. A school in New Mexico, just last year. An alleyway in a project in New Orleans, back in 1987, where an alleged drug deal gone bad had escalated into a situation that left

sixteen people dead and thirty one wounded.

'It's him,' I said, again and again. 'It's him.'

Eventually the tape stopped, without ceremony. Presumably very few people made it all the way

through to the end.

'We need more tape,' Bobby said.

'No we don't,' I said. 'No, we really don't.'

'Yes. Of the ones where he wasn't caught on camera.'

'He probably wasn't there. He won't be the only one. There will be others like him.' I went through to

the bathroom and drank about three pints of lukewarm water out of a very small glass.

'Plane crashes,' Bobby said, when I came back. 'Bombings in Northern Ireland, South Africa. Civil wars in the last ten years. Flu epidemics. Someone has to start them. Maybe we've been looking in the wrong places. Maybe it's not fundamentalists for one side or another. Maybe it's people who hate

everybody.'

I shook my head, but without a great deal of conviction.

Bobby took the tape out of the machine and turned it over in his hands. 'But why just stand there? And what are the chances of him being caught in a camera shot, so many times?'

'It's not chance. It's a signature, supposed to be read by those who know. To say 'The Straw Men

did this'.'

'But we've caught him now'

'Have we? A blond man, shots too short and long to see properly, and a bunch of unconnected events spread over ten years and half the Western world? You want to call Langley, see if anyone's interested? Or shall we try CNN? We're nobody's idea of Woodward and Bernstein and this just sounds like conspiracy crap until we've got more than glimpses. You could spend all day on a computer and not get half an ID out of any of the images we've seen.'

'What about the Web page? The Manifesto?'

'It's not there any more, Bobby. We could have typed it ourselves.'

'So, what? You're just going to forget about it?'

'No,' I said. I sat on the end of the bed and picked up the hotel phone. 'There's maybe one person

who would help. Two, in fact. The pair who hot-dogged it up to Hunter's Rock.'

'Why? They're after a serial killer.'

'And how would you define that term?'

'This is different. Killing a lot of people is not the same.'

'Not usually,' I said. 'But nobody says you can only do one and not the other. This guy is their point man. Organizer, inciter, evangelizer — the man who sets situations up, picks patsies, gets the job done. Terrorism without attribution. Murder for the sake of it. Then he stands and watches people sorting the body parts. You telling me that's not the kind of guy who could be into serial killing too? I think this guy is their killer. I think he's the real Upright Man after all.'

'Ward — you couldn't give the guy a parking ticket on that argument.'

'Maybe not. But we need help. Nina is the only person I can think of. These fucks killed my parents. I don't care what I have to say to get her on side.'

Bobby looked at me, and eventually nodded. 'Make the call.'

28

Some of the time it was like being dead. Some of the time it was like being something else, like a fish or a tree or a cloud or a dog, a damn dog. Dogs are manic and preach in the streets but it's better being a damn dog than dead. Most of the time it was like being nothing at all, just a small bundle of sweet nothing floating down a river under a sky in which no birds sang.

Sarah was very ill by now. Very occasionally she would remember where and who she was. Her stomach had ceased to cramp. She had stopped registering its sensations. She believed it was still a part of her, and that she also retained her arms and legs. Sometimes there would be a horrible proof of this, an appalling pain that shot up from her toes all the way through her body. It was like a kind of pins and needles, except that the needles and pins were red-hot and a foot long and someone slid them under her skin and then pushed with all their might and left them there. The pain eventually faded, but Sarah was never present for that part. By the time that happened, she would be back on the river, floating downstream again.

Sometimes people would talk to her as she floated. She heard voices, anyhow. She would hear her friends, her grandmother and sister occasionally, but most often she would hear her mom and dad. Usually they were talking about inconsequential things, as if she was sitting at the table in the living room and doing her homework, and they were just next door and chatting the way you do. You couldn't hear all of what was being said, not usually. It was half-sentences, snatches here and there. 'Charles thinks Jeff's going to fly with this version.' 'Brunch, but this one could be worth it.' 'It's just a third-act thing.' Her mother would say things about her day, where she had been and who she had seen: 'You can do what you like with your face, but you can't hide the back of your hands.' But then her father would say something that had just come into his head, and she would hear all of it, like: 'You know what I'd do if I was famous? Stalk people. I'd find some nobody and just keep popping up in their lives. Who's going to believe them? 'Hey, Mr Policeman — Cameron Diaz keeps bothering me.' Or… 'Look, I've got all these letters from Tom Cruise. No, I have. He's pestering me. That's his handwriting. It really is.' You could send someone completely over the edge. Pretty quickly, too.'

Sarah didn't know whether she'd ever heard him say these things in the time before her life had become a drifting thing. She didn't think so. She thought it was something just for her, something to keep her company as she floated. He'd always said words for her, the things that came into his head. Mom didn't always realize they were jokes, and didn't often find them funny. Sarah usually did.

After a while the voices would fade.

At other times she would hear footsteps, and know that it was them come to save her. She would hear them getting closer and closer, until her mouth began to move, ready to say something when the panel was lifted and her father's face appeared. They would stand right above her, their feet shuffling on the boards that covered her body. But they never found her. The footsteps would fade, and then she would be floating again.

Occasionally something would rise up in her body, most often after Nokkon had come. Heaves, which cut across her stomach like a knife dipped in ice, until she felt sure she was going to split in two. There was nothing to come up, not even the water, because her body absorbed that as quickly as it could. Her body had got with the program. Sometimes it talked to her now, ticking her off. It was doing its best to hold steady, but it was really very unhappy with the situation. It couldn't be expected to deal with this. Her body had a voice like Gillian Anderson's. It was very reasonable and spoke in long sentences that it must have thought out very clearly ahead of time. But it wasn't happy, and it had stopped believing that things were going to get better. Sarah listened to what it said, and tried to take an interest, but she didn't think there was anything she could do to help.

Nokkon was her only real friend, and even he didn't come very often any more. Sarah got the feeling he was disappointed in her. He still talked, and gave her water, and told her things, but she sensed it was mainly for his own benefit. He pretended that he was a real person, that when he had been younger he had met people made of hay. That they had found him, or he them. That he had learned from them, and they now learned from him. Nokkon sometimes had those people with him now. That's what he said, anyway, though Sarah couldn't understand why he was bothering to lie. She knew what they were. They were his goblins. They did his bidding and ranged far and wide, watching out for those who were foolish enough to believe themselves lucky, as Sarah once had. They kept tabs on people with microphones and listening bats flying over every house in the world. Some of the goblins were very big, and could stomp hard enough to shake the ground into earthquakes and volcanoes. Others were very, very small and flew through the air and went in through people's pores so they could stir cells around and make black things grow in their lungs and hearts and liver. The big goblins had voices like thunder. The little ones sounded as if they were Welsh. When Sarah coughed she kept her mouth shut so that none of them could fly into her. A few of the goblins were normal sized. They were quite rare. She never saw any of them, but she knew they were there. She banged her head against the wood above her head, trying to make them go away.

Then everyone would fade out and it would get darker again and she would be floating on and on. At first when she'd floated, it had been like lying with her back on the water, borne along on the surface. It had actually been quite nice. But now she seemed to float lower and lower in the water, as if she was sinking. Her ears were already below the surface, and before long it would be her eyes.

When the tip of her nose was under, she knew she wouldn't be floating any more.

29

Zandt stood outside a door in Dale Lawns. When his first ring on the buzzer elicited no response, he pressed it again, leaning on it with all of his weight until he saw a figure through the mottled glass in the door's upper portion, coming toward him out of the white light beyond.

Gloria Neiden was dressed in top-to-bottom designer, for an evening at home. Yet from her first words it was evident she was drunk. Not benign, cheerful drunk, or even falling-down drunk. Opaquely drunk. Drunk to be alone.

'Who the hell are you?'

'My name is John Zandt,' he said. 'We met two years ago.'

'I'm afraid I don't recall. I certainly don't remember making any arrangements to renew our

acquaintance.' This was delivered well, with only one minor slur.

She started to close the door. Zandt stopped it with his hand.

'I was one of the policemen who worked the disappearance of Annette Mattison,' he said.

Mrs Neiden blinked, and it was as if the movement caused a grey chemical to spread down through

her face, something that imperfectly embalmed it.

'Yes,' she said, folding her arms. 'I remember you now. Good work. All nicely tidied away, right?'

'No. Which is why I'm here now.'

'My daughter is out with friends. And even if she wasn't, I would insist that she didn't speak to you. It

has taken us all a long time to try to come to terms with what happened.'

'I'm sure,' Zandt said. 'And has it worked?'

She stared at him, momentarily sobered. 'What do you mean?'

'What I mean,' he said, 'is that my daughter also disappeared, and coming to terms with it is never

going to happen. I want a very short period of your time, during which you might be able to help me find out who destroyed our lives.'

'Surely you should be talking to the Mattisons, rather than me?'

'I have one question for you. That's all.'

She turned away, this time pushing the door more firmly.

Zandt held it open once again, and spoke without allowing himself to think. 'A question that may stop your husband starting or continuing an affair. That may prevent your daughter from suggesting that it might be better if she doesn't bring her friends home. Which may mean that you're less likely to drive your car into a wall one afternoon because you misjudged a turn or because it just seemed like a good idea.'

Gloria Neiden stared at him. It took a few seconds for her to find a voice.

'Fuck off,' she said, low and hard. 'You have no right to speak to me like that. You should have found him. It's not my fault. None of this is my fault.'

'I know,' Zandt said, watching as her face underwent another horrific change, transformed from animal to frightened girl and back to woman, like a putty mask squeezed by a vicious child. 'Nothing that happened was your fault. I know that. Your family knows that. Everybody knows it except you. You can say it, but you don't really believe it. And that's what will kill you.'

They stood like that for a while, one each side of the doorway, both pushing. Then neither was pushing, merely standing.

He called Nina on the way to Santa Monica. She sounded distracted but agreed to meet him in Bel Air. The address was on file.

Michael Becker answered the door, and agreed to come with him without explanation. They left Zok standing on the doorstep, holding their younger daughter's hand. She did not create a fuss or demand to be told what was going on. Zandt realized it would have been the same if it had been Zok whom he had asked along, if Michael had been left receding in the rearview mirror of the Beckers' car. The Beckers trusted each other to hold the fort, responsibilities shifting as circumstances dictated. When nothing else makes sense, it is only your relationship to one person, and one person alone, that stands any chance of protecting you against the world. He wished this was a realization he could have had while he was still with Jennifer.

When the car was moving Zandt asked Michael for the address. Zandt told him to drive there, and refused to answer any of Michael's questions. 'You're going to have to see it' was all he would say. 'You're going to have to be there.'

Becker's post-Euclidean understanding of the geometry of LA meant it took nearly forty minutes to get back the other side of the city, but then they were climbing up into the hills and passing houses that got bigger and bigger with every turn, until they were so big that you couldn't even see them from the road.

Finally they came to a cul-de-sac. On either side lay tall security gates. The headlights revealed another car parked discreetly a little way up the road. Nina was leaning against it, her arms firmly folded and one eyebrow raised. Essence of Nina.

'This is it,' Michael said. 'This is where he lives.' he wasn't stupid. He had begun to make the journey, even if it had yet to reach a fully conscious level. 'What do I say?'

Zandt got out of the car. Nina was more than ready to ask some questions, but he held up a hand and she kept her peace.

'Just get us inside,' he told Michael.

Becker went up to the gatepost and pressed a button. He spoke briefly, and the gates opened within moments.

Then Zandt was walking fast up the path, with Michael and Nina struggling to keep up.

When they reached the house the door was open, and a slim man was standing in the light glow from within. The vastness of the estate stretched out on either side. Zandt grabbed Michael's arm, and shoved him in front as they covered the final yards.

'Hey, Michael,' the man said. 'Who's your friend?'

Zandt stepped out from behind and grabbed Charles Wang by the throat. With his other hand he hit

him twice, short-arm punches to the middle of the face.

Nina stared. 'John, what the hell are you doing?'

'Shut the door.' Zandt shoved Wang back into the vast foyer of the house. He punched him again,

threw him backward to crash into the white marble of the wall. Picked him up and smacked him into a French-style mirror, shattering the top half.

A very young man in a white jacket came running out of a doorway under the staircase which swept

around the foyer to the upper floor. He found that Zandt had a gun, and that it was pointing at his face.

'Go back inside, Julio,' Wang said. His voice was steady.

'Yes, Julio,' Zandt said. 'Go somewhere else and be very quiet. You pick up the phone, then when

I'm finished with this fuck I'm going to hunt you down and pull your fucking head off.'

The boy backed rapidly out of sight.

Zandt turned the gun back on Wang, who half-lay on the floor by the bottom of the mirror, crumpled

as if his back was broken.

'Aren't you going to run?' Zandt asked. He kicked him hard, in the side. 'Try to get away?'

'Stop it,' Nina shouted. 'Tell me what's going on.'

Suddenly Wang was in movement, a fluid push up from the floor. Zandt brought the barrel of the gun

hammering down into his face, stopping him dead in his tracks. Wang made a short clicking sound in his throat, and dropped back to the ground.

Zandt forced his head up. Wang's eyes stared back at him through blood that began to run down from a cut on his forehead. In them Zandt saw nothing but weakness and guile.

'We fucked up,' Zandt said. 'We looked at level one. We missed level two. We didn't even dream about a level three.'

Wang smiled up at him as if wondering how much he'd cost to buy. Zandt let go of his throat and slapped his face hard. 'Look at him, he shouted. 'Not me. Look at Michael.'

Wang seemed for a moment as if he was going to try to run again, but the jab of the gun in his throat convinced him to stay. He slowly turned his eyes toward Michael Becker.

'We never caught The Upright Man,' Zandt said, 'because we were looking for the person who abducted the girls. The reason why we didn't find the man who abducted the girls was that there was no common link, because they were abducted by different men. Today I looked at some other girls, girls who were similar and disappeared at around the same time. In the end I looked at two in particular. Two girls from New York, who couldn't possibly be connected with The Upright Man, because they went missing on the opposite side of the country at exactly the same time as he was working here.'

Wang blinked, tried to turn his eyes away from Becker's face. Zandt shoved the gun deeper into his windpipe, and the eyes swivelled back.

'One girl's father is a development exec for Miramax on the East Coast. The mother of the other girl is halfway up a brokering company who mainly deals with private banks in Switzerland but who also — as I established this very afternoon — has a sideline in using the banks' client lists to find sleeping partners for low-budget film production in Europe. But these are New York girls, right? We're looking for West Coast girls. So I called on Gloria Neiden before I called you. I asked her to list every single person she worked with in the year before her best friend's daughter wound up dead. Every partner, half-partner, agent, exec, financier, loser and wannabe. It took a while, because Mrs Neiden is flaky these days and it's a hard thing to ask someone to remember. But eventually a name came up.'

Michael Becker stood a couple of yards behind Zandt, staring into the eyes of a man he had sat in sunny offices with, emailed jokes to, hugged after near-successful runs for the television end-zones. The man who had visited his house a hundred times, who had come to family dinners, who had sat in his daughter's bedroom and chatted to her about what a fine time she'd had in England. Who'd known that talking about England might be a way to hold her attention for long enough for the right moment to arrive to abduct her.

Wang said nothing.

'Charles doesn't kill the girls,' Zandt said. 'He doesn't abduct them either. That would be dangerous. Charles doesn't want real danger. He wants power, and kicks, and a feeling that he moves in mysterious ways. All Charles does is pass on information. Charles can find special girls, quality girls. Charles works on commission, I'm sure, but mainly Charles works for fun.'

'Charles,' Michael said, 'Say something. Tell me this isn't right.'

'Yes. Tell us how much you get per girl,' Zandt said. 'Explain why, when these people could pluck people off the street, it means so much more to them to reach directly into families. To steal from people who are supposed to be your friends. Explain the thrill of that, because we really fucking want to know.'

Without warning he stepped back and stomped viciously on Wang's chest. Then he was back in the man's face, shouting: 'Who takes them? Who does the abducting? Where do they go?'

His eyes still on Michael Becker, Wang licked his lips.

'You think I know their names?'

Zandt: 'Describe.'

'If I don't?'

Zandt moved the gun an inch and pulled the trigger. The bullet smashed into the marble just behind Wang's head and ricocheted viciously across the room. Shards of marble and glass sliced across the man's scalp and face. The gun was moved back to his neck.

Wang spoke fast. 'There are three I know of. There were four, but one disappeared two years ago. They all look different — what the hell do you want me to say? You think we meet up and have beers?'

'Describe the one who took Michael's daughter. You must have had contact with him.'

'It was all done by email and phone.'

'Bullshit. Emails can be logged and phones can be tapped. But two guys meeting in a hotel bar someplace, in LA, who's going to pay attention to that?'

Wang licked his lips again. Zandt moved the muzzle of the gun until it was square in the middle of his forehead. Wang watched pressure being applied to the trigger. His lips started to move, but the cop held up his finger.

'Don't just tell me what you think I want to hear,' Zandt said. 'I think you're lying, I'll kill you.'

'He's a tall guy,' he said. 'Blond. Husky,' he said. 'His name is Paul.'

Zandt stood up and wiped the man's sweat off his hand. He took a step back to stand with Nina,

leaving Michael facing Wang.

'Is this true?' Becker's voice was barely audible. 'How. How could. Why? Why, Charles? I mean…' At a loss, standing in a house he would never be able to afford no matter how many studio asses he kissed, he fixed on something trivial but concrete. 'It can't be for the fucking money.'

'You're a little man, with little goals,' Wang said bitterly, wiping blood off his lip with the back of his hand. 'Silly girls who've never been fucked. An old maid imagination. You've never touched anything big, and you never will. You'll certainly never touch her, not now.' He winked. 'You'll never know what you're missing.'

Zandt was faster. He intercepted Becker, grabbing his shoulders and throwing all of his weight in the other direction. He was heavier than the other man by some margin, but still only just managed to hold

him away.

'Didn't happen, Michael,' he said. 'It didn't happen.'

After a moment, the force in Michael seemed to drop away. Zandt still held him firmly, as Becker

stared over his shoulder at the man who smiled up at him from the floor.

'We're not going to kill him. Do you understand?' He pulled Becker's face round, so that he could look at him properly. The man's eyes were wide, unseeing. 'I can't promise I can give your daughter

back. She may be dead, and if she is then this man is partly to blame. But we are going to leave this house and walk away. That's the only thing I know for sure that I can give you. That you not walk out of here as a murderer.'

Becker's eyes slowly came back into focus. His body went slack for a moment, and then became rigid again. But he took a step back, and let his arms rest down by his sides.

Zandt put his gun away. The three of them looked at the man lying on the floor. 'You're going to have company very soon,' Zandt told him. 'Cop company, fed company. Company with search warrants. Better get the place tidied up.'

Then they left, leaving a pale man staring after them.

Nothing was said until they stood beside the car. Michael looked back up at the house. 'What am I

supposed to do?'

Nina started to speak, but Zandt overrode her.

'Nothing. Don't tell the police. Don't tell your wife either. I know you'll want to. But not for the

moment. Most of all do not come back up here. What needs to be done will be done.'

'By whom?'

'Get in the car, Michael.'

'I can't let you do that for me.'

'Just get in the car.'

Eventually Becker climbed in and drove away, the car barely rolling down the road, veering slowly

from side to side. Nina got out her phone and started to dial. Zandt knocked it out of her hand, and it fell to the ground

to skitter six feet along the road surface.

'Leave it,' he said.

She glared at him, but let the phone lie where it had fallen. 'So — did you really call the cops?'

'You know I didn't.'

Zandt lit a cigarette and they waited. Ten minutes later they heard the sound that Zandt had been expecting, the muffled report without which he would have walked back into the house and done what was required, regardless of anything Nina did to try to stop him.

And yet, as soon as he heard it, he felt utterly weary and not in the least triumphant. More as if by getting closer to the source of these events all he had done was further compromise himself; as if the smell from what lurked under mankind's surface was now so strong that he would never be able to wash it off.

She turned to look at him. 'So he's dead.'

'All he did was hand the girls higher up the ladder. We could have wasted days interrogating him and

all he would have done is fuck us around.'

'Not saying you're wrong. I'm just asking what you're thinking of doing next.'

Zandt shrugged. 'Good,' she said, stooping to pick up her phone. Lights were coming on in porches across the street. 'Because it won't be too long before the cops do get up here. I don't want to be around when they do.'

She strode off toward her car, adding over her shoulder. 'And I have a couple of people who think they might be able to show you where to find a blond man kind of like the one you've just heard described.'

Zandt stared at her. 'What?'

'Hopkins and the other guy. He called just before you did. They have a video showing a man at half of the major-league atrocities of the last decade, including the school in Maine this morning. A guy who Ward also thinks he saw at this place up in the mountains.'

'If you knew this, why didn't you stop me with Wang?'

She looked at him across the roof of the car. 'I didn't want to save him any more than you did.'

30

Neither Zandt nor Nina knew that, while Wang had killed himself, he had made a phone call before doing so.

First he had laboriously pulled himself to his feet, hands slipping in the smears of his own blood. He was unable to stand completely straight. He had been beaten up before, had volunteered for the experience on more than one occasion, but this was different. The cop had not been bearing Wang's pleasure in mind, and things were broken.

He stood for a moment, looking in the remains of the mirror under which he had given up his greatest secret. His face was marked and cut. Worse, it looked old. The expensive veneer of diet and exercise, of unguents and self-obsession, had slipped. He looked his age, and in a way that only someone who had done the things he had, kept his secrets as long as he had, could look.

He had never killed. He had seldom even hurt anyone. Not with his own hands. But he had been present at occasions where young men had been left lying in pools of urine and other secretions, barely alive. Where other men like himself had departed in their expensive cars and had been lucky not to end up as accessories to murder. He owned an extensive collection of videotapes in which such events were documented. So extensive, in fact, that it was very unlikely he would be able to find them all, much less destroy them, before the police arrived.

His father would never understand.

Neither, Wang suspected, would the men and women with whom he did more legitimate business — although he knew that some of them had their own secrets, that the inner fire that drove them to fame and success also drove them to darker acts, in which they strove to prove to themselves that they were different and better than everyone else. The adulation of others is never enough. Sooner or later we all need to be able to idolize ourselves, or external regard becomes meaningless. Substances and materials had been obtained, sobbing women paid off, sometimes by Wang himself, who had always been willing to be people's friend. A confidant of those whose desires transcended society's accepted norms. Who wanted to live harder and faster and sweeter. Who could understand that sex with the frightened was different.

It was one of these, a man who had reason to know how helpful Wang could sometimes be, who had brokered a link to some colleagues of his. The representative of this group had been a tall blond man. The man called Paul. This introduction had only taken place after some years, and it was longer still before Wang had come to realize that this man was not quite what he seemed to be, and that he — and the people he represented — had something more than casual pleasure in mind. He'd never been invited to meet them, which had irked him a little. But he had agreed to provide entertainment, to help the procurers find particular luxuries, and the policeman had been right: money had nothing to do with it.

Each has his own road, and experiences two births. For Wang his second nativity had come thirty-five years before, at the age of ten, with a chance glimpse of a naked servant through a window. A spring morning in another country, a sight that had stopped him in his tracks, blindsided him with the sudden awareness of all of the hidden things the world had to show. His father had been in his home office, from which wafted the sound of baroque music, measured and correct, bright and joyous. Wang had stood still for a moment, lost in a few seconds of sweetness. Most people could have experienced this without it changing their lives, but Charles had never been quite the same. From the smallest of acorns, very dark trees sometimes grow.

After that had come deliberate spying, then magazines, and videotapes, trips alone to parts of Hong Kong and then Los Angeles that not everyone knew. Again, for most people these would have been enough, even too much. The sin was not there in the material, or even in wanting it. It was in needing it, needing it before you even knew of its existence — needing it so much that had it not already existed, you would have had to create it. Blaming pornography is like blaming a gun. Neither created itself. Neither is capable of pulling its own trigger. You need a hand. The human mind is this searching hand, its fingers slender enough to find small gaps, and strong enough to pull out what it finds in them. It is similar, too, in that after a time calluses sometimes form, hardnesses of use that mean that the sense of touch is rendered less acute. Hardnesses that may mean that something hotter or sharper is required to promote the same effect: and there does come a time when you are in blood stepped so far that it stops mattering what you tread in next.

In the last week Wang had experienced only one occasion when the fate of Michael Becker's daughter had crossed his mind. This had been in the context of hoping that Michael got back to work soon, because it looked like the studio really might decide to take a chance on Dark Shift. Laughable though Becker was in many regards, he worked hard, and he had ideas. Ideas, moreover, that were acceptable to the common mind. Wang had his own version of the Dark Shift treatment, written for his own amusement. It would not have been so acceptable.

None of this would be acceptable. Nothing he had ever done that he had meant or enjoyed. And without those things, there was little left to comprehend, and nothing left to live for. Without the memory and legacy of a spring morning, of a glimpse framed by music and the sound of the water falling in a fountain nearby, there was nothing to him.

By the time Zandt was lighting his cigarette outside, Wang had shuffled into his study. The initial shock was beginning to wear off, and his ribs were in agony. He called a number and warned a friend that someone had come too close to understanding the game they played, had perhaps come to understand it completely.

Then he sat back in his chair. There was no sign of Julio, though it must by now have been obvious that the visitors had gone. For just a moment Wang realized that, for once, it might have been nice to have access to someone whose point was not merely that of disposability. Doubtless the boy would have left the compound over the back fence, to run down the road into some other life. Like a smile from yesterday, he was gone.

Wang unlocked the central drawer of his desk and pulled out his gun. It had custom stocks made of cherry wood.

It was beautiful. There was that, at least.

31

At 8.45 the next morning we were waiting in the car just along the street from Auntie's Pantry. It was cold and had been sleeting for two hours, and the sky was full of dark clouds. I had a pack of cigarettes and was smoking them one after another. Bobby had nothing to say on the subject. He was sitting with his gun in his lap and staring straight ahead out of the windshield.

'So what time are they getting up here?'

'No guarantee they'll come at all,' I said.

He shook his head. 'A cop with no badge and a girl. Fuck it. We're invincible. Let's invade Iraq.'

'There's no one else, Bobby.'

A nondescript car turned into the top of the street. We watched as it drove past, but the driver was a middle-aged woman and she didn't even glance our way. We were waiting for someone to arrive at an office, and had been since 8.00 a.m. We were hyped and jumping at shadows. Neither of us had slept very well.

'Okay,' Bobby said finally, pointing across the street. 'Weedy dude, red hair. That the man we're looking for?'

We waited until Chip was inside his office, and then got out of the car. I left the doors unlocked. The street was pretty empty. It wasn't the weather for window-shopping, and any real traffic through the town got routed another way.

I swung the door to Farling Realty wide open and walked right in, Bobby just behind me. Chip had disappeared into an office in the back. The big main room had four desks spread around it. Two of these were occupied by well-coiffed women in their forties, wearing boxy little suits, one green, one red. Both

looked up expectantly, ready and willing to sell us our dream.

'Looking for Chip,' I said.

One of the women stood up. 'Mr Farling will be right with you,' she twittered. 'Can I get you a cup of

coffee in the meantime?'

'I don't think Mr Hopkins will be staying.'

Chip was standing in the doorway to the other office. There was a livid bruise across one cheek and

his forehead. 'In fact, I think he'll be leaving very soon.'

'Exactly what we had in mind, Chip. But you're coming with us. We're going up to The Halls, and we need someone to get us in. In your recent capacity as the only realtor working for them, you're in pole position. You can either come with us under your own steam or we can pull you out onto the street by

the throat.'

'I don't think so,' he said, an irritating expression on his face.

There was the sound of a bell ringing as the door to the office opened behind us. I turned to see two

cops. One was tall and black-haired. The other smaller and fair. The latter spoke.

'Good morning, Mr Hopkins,' he said.

'Do I know you?'

'We've spoken on the phone.'

'I don't recall the circumstances.'

'You called the station. We discussed your parent's deaths.'

Behind me I was aware of the rustle of Bobby's hand, as it moved within his jacket pocket.

'Officer Spurring,' I said.

'He's here at my request,' Chip said. 'I saw you and your friend sitting outside. I've already reported

the way you attacked me.'

'I saw it as a minor difference of opinion,' I said. 'Then you had a weird whole-body spasm.'

'I didn't view it that way. And neither do the police.'

'This is bullshit, Ward,' Bobby said.

Chip turned to the two women, who were watching the exchange like a pair of interested cats.

'Doreen? Julia? I wonder if you could go into the back office for a moment.'

'We've come for you, Chip,' I said. 'Nobody else needs to move.'

'Now,' Chip said, staring hard at the women. They got to their feet and trooped past him into the

other room. He pulled the door shut behind them.

'It would really be better if you came to the station,' Spurling said. His manner was calm and very reasonable. 'I don't know if you're aware of this, but there has been damage to your parents' house and a hotel fire that seems to bear some relevance. Officer McGregor and I want to help.'

'You see, the thing is,' I said, 'I'm just not sure I believe that.'

'What's the deal with your partner?' Bobby asked Spurling. 'Doesn't say much, does he.'

The second cop gazed back at Bobby, but didn't say a word. That's when I started to get twitchy.

Guy looks in Bobby's eyes for long with anything less than respect, he's either stupid or extremely dangerous or both.

'Division of labour,' I said, hoping the situation, such as it was, was salvageable. 'Maybe McGregor here is a dab hand at filing forms.'

'You're an asshole, Hopkins,' Chip said. 'Obviously it's genetic'

Spurling ignored him. 'Mr Hopkins — are you going to come with me?'

'No,' Bobby said.

Chip smiled. McGregor took out a gun.

'Hey, easy,' I said, now very nervous. Officer Spurling looked even more surprised than I felt. He stared at the weapon in his partner's hand.

'Uh, George…' he said. But then McGregor started shooting.

We were on the move the moment Chip's face creased into his smug little grin, but it was still too slow. There was nowhere to run in the office. Hiding wasn't going to cut it.

Bobby's gun was in his hand and firing at McGregor. The cop took bullets in the thigh and chest. But the hits didn't make the sound they should have, and I realized he was wearing Kevlar. The impact was enough to smack him over a chair and onto his back, but he was soon struggling to his feet. Meanwhile Spurling remained stockstill, his mouth open.

I was a foot ahead of McGregor's bullet, having hurled myself to the floor in a roll. I came up behind Doreen's desk and shot back, catching him in the shoulder. Something swished right past my head, and I realized that Chip, too, had a little pistol in his hand. After that I really don't remember too much. I just emptied the gun at whatever came up. You get involved in a gun battle on an open plain, maybe you've got time to consider, to take note of the blow by blow, to think. You spend time thinking in confined quarters with two guys shooting at you, you're never going to complete the thought.

Ten seconds later the shooting stopped. By then I was jammed behind Julia's desk and I had a stinging pain on my cheek and forehead where something had sliced across it. Not a bullet, I didn't think. Something that got hit and exploded. I was very surprised not to be more badly hurt. The contents of Chip's head were spread across the back wall. McGregor was nowhere to be seen, and the door to the office was hanging open.

Spurling had gotten hit in the leg and fallen over a desk. He was moving but not very fast. His head was still where it should be. I left it mat way.

Bobby was pressed back against the wall near the door, hand clamped over his arm and blood coursing from between his fingers. I ran over and grabbed him.

We fell out onto the pavement, stumbled across the road, and I opened his door and pushed him in. A passing couple dressed in bright orange ski wear were looking back and forth between us and the shattered realty office windows with their mouths open.

'It's some movie,' one of them said. 'Got to be.'

'I'm okay,' Bobby muttered, as I climbed in the driver's side and started the engine. I jumped on the

pedal and sent us hurtling down the street. 'I'm fine.'

'You've been shot, you asshole.'

'Slow down.' There was a stop sign right ahead, and traffic to be contended with. I eased off the pedal and by chance managed to squeeze through a gap and into the far lane. 'Where are you going?'

'The hospital, Bobby.'

'We can't go there,' he said. 'Not after that.'

'Spurling will back us up.'

'All he knows is a lot of shooting went down. They both got shot and a civilian wound up dead.'

'He knows that McGregor pushed it. And I can get us out on the highway and find the nearest

hospital out of town.'

'Where they'll still have to report it and we'll still have shot some cops.'

'Bobby, you've been shot. I don't want to have to explain that to you again.'

While I kept us heading west, ducking back and forth between the lines of cars, he gingerly removed

his hand from his arm. I glanced across. A fresh glot of blood tipped out, but not as much as I'd expected. Wincing, he pulled the fabric around the hole aside and peered at what lay underneath.

'There's a chunk missing,' he admitted. 'Which is not ideal. But I'll live. And we have a need more urgent than medical support.'

'And what's that?'

'Guns,' he said, slumping back in the seat. 'Big fucking guns.'

I left Bobby in the car while I ran across to the store. It was raining hard now, and the clouds were getting darker. Before I swung open the door I took a moment to gather myself. Many retailers like to cultivate the impression that they're selling machines that are only theoretically weapons. You don't want to run into a gun shop looking like you're thinking of using one right this minute.

Inside, a long thin space. A glass counter displaying handguns like jewellery, and behind it racks and racks of rifles on the wall. No customers and no reinforced shield. Just one white-haired fat guy in a dark blue shirt, standing around waiting for business.

'Help you?' The man placed two large hands on the counter. On the wall behind him were two posters showing the faces of well-known Middle Eastern terrorists. 'Wanted Dead' the legend said. 'Or Alive' had been crossed out.

'Want to buy some guns,' I said.

'Only sell frozen yogurt here. Keep meaning to take that damned sign down.'

I laughed heartily. He laughed, too. It was all very cool. We were having a great time.

'So. What kind of thing you looking for?'

'Two rifles with eight hundred rounds, forty clips of soft 45 and I don't care what kind, whatever's

cheapest. Two vests, expensive, one large and one medium.'

'Whoa,' he said, still cheerful. 'Planning on starting a war?'

'No. But boy do we have a rodent problem.' His smile faded, and I was suddenly aware that he was

looking at my cheek. I put my hand up and wiped it. It came away with a small smear of blood. 'As you can see, it's getting completely out of hand.'

He didn't laugh this time. 'Don't know as I can sell you all that.'

I got out a Gold American Express card and he was soon smiling again. He totalled up the cost of the items by hand, allowing me a discount on the ammunition. If you buy in bulk the unit cost of eight hundred potential deaths is actually very reasonable.

He told me the total and I waved my hand, anxious that he just get on with it. I glanced out the window at Bobby. He had his jacket off and was wrapping a bandage round the wound. I'd picked this up at a veterinary supply store on the way through town, along with safety pins and microgauze. He was

wincing a lot. I turned back just in time.

'Don't do that,' I said, pulling out my gun and pointing it at the guy's chest.

He froze, eyes still on me, hand a few inches from the phone. 'Don't tell me. Couple days ago a cop

came in here, told you not to sell anything to someone by the name of Ward Hopkins?'

'That's correct.'

'But you're going to do it anyway, right?'

'No, sir. I am not.'

I took a step closer, and raised the gun so it was pointing at his head. I felt exhausted and frightened.

He shook his head, and reached for the phone again. 'I ain't selling you nothing.'

The telephone was an old-fashioned model, and made an extraordinary sound when the bullet ripped into it. The man jumped back, very shaken.

'Yes, you are,' I explained. 'Otherwise I'll just shoot you and take what I need and you're in no position to whine because the gun I'm holding was bought from this very establishment. Guess what? This is how they get used.'

The guy stood still for a moment, working out which way to jump. I really, really hoped he'd just do as I asked, because I wasn't going to shoot him and he probably knew it.

Then his eyes flickered. I turned and saw that a young guy was heading toward the store. He was

carrying a bag of sandwiches and wearing the same kind of shirt the fat guy was wearing.

I swore, lunged forward, and grabbed as many boxes as I could carry.

'You've been no help at all,' I snapped, and ran out the door, smacking straight into the younger guy

and sending him sprawling into a puddle.

I jumped in the car, throwing the boxes of bullets into Bobby's lap. 'Didn't go well.'

'So I see,' Bobby said, watching the fat man as he came out the door holding a large rifle.

I slammed my foot on the pedal and reversed away from the building, as the first shot went high of the car. The younger guy made his feet again and ran into the store, pushing the other guy aside. I hit the brake and skid-turned the vehicle around, and then sent it hurtling back onto the road as a bullet took out one of the back passenger windows.

'Guy in the store had my name on a list.' I took a hard right turn. I wasn't heading anywhere in particular. Just getting us out of the centre of town. 'One question's answered, at least. How The Straw Men managed to get to my folks' house so quickly after I roughed Chip up last time. They didn't have to come at all. They had McGregor already here in town.'

'Adds up.'

'Something else that makes sense: McGregor and Spurling were the cops at the scene of my parents' accident. Except maybe McGregor was a little earlier at the scene.'

'And is now back at Dyersburg PD dripping blood on the floor and chanting our names. We're deeply fucked, Ward — very deeply fucked. What are we going to do?'

There was only one person in town I could think of who might stand a chance of wanting to help me. I said his name.

'Good call,' Bobby nodded, wincing as he settled back into his seat. 'Way things are going, an attorney's going to come in handy.'

According to the card he'd given me after the funeral, Harold Davids's house was right on the other side of town. Unlike the area where my parents had lived, with its hills and twisting streets, the houses here were laid out in a regular grid — albeit a grid with big squares and nice-looking houses sitting in them.

When we pulled up outside we could see that the porch light was on, along with one deeper in the house. There was a car that looked like the one I'd seen Davids in, parked a little way along the street. We sat for a moment, to check we weren't being followed, and then got out.

I rang the doorbell. There was no reply. Of course.

'Shit,' I said. 'Now what?'

'Call him,' Bobby said, watching down the street. I pulled out the cell phone and tried Davids's office number. Then I tried the home number, in case he disregarded the doorbell in the evenings or was deep in some show and hadn't noticed. We could hear at least two handsets ringing on different floors of the house, but after eight rings a machine picked up. The tape gave his work number, but there was no mention of a cell phone.

'We can't just stand here,' I said. 'Neighbourhood like this, someone's going to put in a call to the cops.'

Bobby turned the door handle. It was locked. He reached in his pocket and got out a small tool. I was on the verge of protesting, but didn't. We had nowhere else to go. He had just levered the tool into the lock when suddenly there was the sound of the door being unlocked from the inside. We both jumped.

The door was opened five inches. Harold Davids's face was just visible through the gap.

'Harold,' I said.

'Ward? Is that you?' He opened the door a little wider. He looked as nervous as hell. 'Good Lord,'

he said. 'What happened to him?'

'He's been shot,' I said.

'Shot,' he said, carefully. 'By whom?'

'Bad guys,' I said. 'Look, I know this is not what you meant when you said I should call on you. But

we're in trouble. And I don't have anyone else left.'

'Ward. I…'

'Please,' I said. 'If not for me, then for Dad.'

He looked at me long and hard, then stood aside and let us in.

His house was a good deal smaller than my parents' home, but even just the hallway seemed to contain about three times as much stuff. Prints, local art objects, books on a little oak case that looked like it had been made on purpose. In the background was the measured sound of classical music for solo piano.

'Go straight through,' he said. 'And be careful of the rug. You're dripping blood. Both of you.'

The living-room walls were covered in reproduction paintings, not a single one of which I recognized. The lighting was sparse, just a couple of tall standard lamps throwing shadows. No television, but a small and expensive-looking CD player from which the music was coming. There was an old-looking piano, the top covered in photographs, some framed, others simply propped up. An ornate carpet lay in front of the couch, the edges a little frayed.

'I'll get a towel,' Davids said. He hesitated in the doorway for a moment, and then disappeared.

While he was gone Bobby stood in the middle of the room, holding his arm, making sure that anything that fell out of it went on the floorboards. I looked around the room. Other people's things are so inexplicable. Especially older people. I remembered one time, on a whim, buying my father an old calculator for Christmas. I saw it in an antiques store and thought it looked cool and that he might like it. When he unwrapped it he stared at me, and said thanks in an odd way. I told him I wasn't getting the impression it was the most exciting thing he'd ever received. Without saying another word he took me through to his study, opened a drawer. There, beneath many years' accumulation of pens and paperclips, was an old calculator. It was even the same model. Davids's life was my yard sale: my retro was my father's once-newfangled. You are insulated from those you care about most by decades of durable time, like glass that seems clean but is a foot thick and impossible to break. You think you're right there with them, but when you try to touch, your hand can't even get near.

Davids came back in with a cloth that Bobby took and wrapped around his arm. Then Davids sat down in one of the armchairs and looked at the floor. He looked tired and pale, and much older than when I'd seen him before. One of the lamps was just to one side of the chair, etching lines into his forehead and accentuating the planes of his face.

'You're going to have to tell me what's happened, Ward. And I can't guarantee I can do much to help. My field is contracts, not … gunfire.'

He pushed his hands through his hair and looked up at me, and that's when a small pale light went on in the back of my head.

I turned, looked at the top of the piano, and then back at Davids.

'You're staring, Ward.'

I opened my mouth to say something, but found nothing there. I closed it again.

'What is it? What have you done?'

His choice of words, which I'm sure was accidental, somehow convinced me. The way they rhymed with 'have become.'

Finally I managed to speak.

'When did you meet my folks, exactly?'

'1995,' he said, promptly. 'The year they arrived.'

'Not before that?'

'No. How could I have done?'

'Maybe run into them at some stage. Somehow. People's paths cross in mysterious ways. Almost like there's something going on that even they don't know about.'

He looked down, back at the floor. 'You're being odd, Ward.'

'How long have you lived in Dyersburg?'

'All my life, as I believe you know.'

'So the name Lazy Ed wouldn't mean anything to you?'

'No.' He didn't look up, but there was no hesitation, no off note in his voice. 'Strange name, if you ask me.'

Bobby was staring at me now.

'Terrible thing,' I said. 'I never even knew his surname. Just knew him as Lazy. Not a great epitaph, but I suppose it doesn't really matter now he's dead.'

'I'm sorry to hear that a friend of yours is dead, Ward, but I really don't understand what you're driving at.'

I took the picture off the piano. It wasn't a group shot. There were only a couple of those, and they were black-and-white, fading mementos of people long dead, frozen stiff in front of a technology they didn't really trust. The one I held was an informal single portrait in colour, taken by some friend long ago, with that washed out and pastel look where the reds retain their fire and the blues stay rich but everything else seemed locked back in a different time, as if the light that reflected off those surfaces was fading, no longer strong enough to reach the present day; as if that era itself was being unmade as fewer and fewer people survived who could remember the feeling of its sun on their face. A young man, in a forest.

'Play the Sodomy one,' I said, looking at a Harold from long ago. 'Put it on Don, big Don man the Don, put it on, Don, put it on.'

'Stop it, Ward.' This time there was a faint quaver in his voice.

Bobby took the photo from me.

'This picture must be from a few years earlier,' I said. 'Harold's younger and thinner than in the video. Hadn't grown his hair yet.'

I turned to Davids. 'You must have been, what — five, six years older than them and Ed, about the same age as Mary. And now you're the only one left. And that's why you didn't answer the door when we rang, and you're not picking up the phone tonight.'

Davids was staring at me. He looked about a hundred years old, and very frightened.

'Oh fuck,' he said, the words coming out as one shuddering breath.

I wanted to grab him, shake him until he talked, until he made me understand what had been going on, until he gave me some means of comprehending my life. But just as he'd shed eighty pounds in the last thirty years, in twenty seconds his face had lost everything I'd previously seen in him, the look you get through a lifetime of telling people where they stand in the eyes of written law. He looked thin, and frail, and even more afraid than I was.

'Tell me,' was all I said.

In the end it was fast and didn't take long.

He told me that a long time ago, there had been five people who were friends.

32

Harold and Mary and Ed were born in Hunter's Rock, and grew up together. They'd lived small-town lives and there are worse things than that. Then they happened to meet two young newcomers in a bar and afterwards the five were always hanging around together.

My parents were already married, but soon found they could not have children. Gradually they realized this wasn't the end of the world. They had each other, enjoyed life as friends and lovers. There were many things to do and find: the years would not pass slowly, nor would they never be happy, just because when they closed the door at night it would only ever be the two of them in their cave. They got on with their lives, tried to accept the cards they'd been dealt. A couple of years passed in work and sleep and Friday nights, long games of pool that nobody lost.

Then the world tilted, and they came to realize that passing on genetic material isn't the only way of making your mark on the universe. Suddenly came an era that I suppose I've never really understood. In a flat cultural plain, mountains and gullies appeared, splitting the ground on which people stood. Demonstrations in the streets. Sit-ins on campus, students and faculty pulling together for the first time. Fights in restaurants that wouldn't allow blacks to eat at the same lunch counter. Police firing on citizens, children turning on their parents. Marches. Shouts of nigger-lover, fascist, queer, commie. Ideas hammered into weapons. Long evenings in people's houses getting stoned, talking about what should be done, talking about new ways of being, talking about talking about talking.

They were older than most activists. They had the time and energy to spare — and more perspective than either the teenagers or the angrily oppressed. Beth Hopkins got involved in the unionization of black domestic workers. Harold gave free legal advice to those who couldn't afford it, or to those whose race had always meant they caught the sharp end of the legislative stick. Don Hopkins set up a campaign to prevent whole neighbourhoods being demolished to make way for the beltways that were the first steps toward the post-modern American city, where the undesirables are fenced out of the centre by six-lane rivers of hurtling steel, and inequality is enshrined in the landscape. Mary and Ed were merely followers, but they helped out wherever they could, and whenever Ed was sober. Mary loved Harold, and Ed just wanted some people to hang around. They held down their jobs and worked in their spare time, these older warriors, people who by this stage were over that dread age of thirty and thus able to temper enthusiasm with a sense of what was important: to concentrate on activities that might actually help people, rather than just yield a warm glow inside and the chance to screw some other excitable young thing flushed with the adrenaline of protest.

For two years they waved banners and fists, gave their time and money and heart. A few things changed. Most did not. The status quo has stamina. Loud guitar and free love can only change so much. Gradually the flavour of the times soured, as the same old forces simmered together for another year. It was Harold who first noticed what was going on. He realized that the people coming to him for legal advice, veterans of hot afternoons spent bellowing at the cops, were in worse and worse shape when they showed up at his door. That peaceful resistance was generating more wounds as the months went by, and that the bruises and scars he was seeing were not all the responsibility of the police. That there were factions within the beautiful people, and that these divisions were growing more telling and violent than those between them and the authorities. That there were groups whose aims seemed much more simple and retrograde than progress, whose agenda held no action points, only darkness.

At first the others disagreed. It was just the dream going flat, a trend Don had predicted long before. The natural divisions were resurfacing, that was all: their flames fanned by the frustrated realization that the People's Republic of America was as far away as ever. But then the deaths began. The demonstrations where both cops and students would be found on the ground with glass bottles in their faces. The street fights that bubbled seemingly out of nothing. The rock concerts where a scuffle would break out and bodies and a gun would be found when the crowd scattered. The explosions that took the lives of innocent bystanders without advancing any sane cause by a yard. Some of these events were the work of people who thought they were doing the right thing, that armed struggle was the only way forward. But the worst events were created by people who had a different plan altogether. The people with the guns and the dynamite were more organized than the freedom fighters, and predated both them and their cause. There was a cuckoo in the tie-dyed nest, rubbing its wings and preparing to fly.

Many people backed out at that stage. The Summer of Love was already fading into the Autumn of Jaded Apathy, and drugs had laid many out cold on the slab. Ed wanted out. Mary did, too. They had only really been in it for the excitement, after all, for something to do with their friends. Politics as social life, slogan as fashion accessory. Even Harold wavered. He was a lawyer. His soul yearned for order.

'But Beth and Don,' Harold said, his voice dry and quiet, 'they couldn't leave it alone.'

They asked questions, tracking lines of conflict. They traced the printers of certain hate sheets, and their authors, and found that the bad grammar and hint of madness were often fake. They looked for the friend of a friend of a friend, the one who people thought had maybe been the one who brought the gun to the demo, or who had first broken a bottle, or could broker you an introduction to the people who were really doing something, not just talking. They looked, and they started to find.

Eventually the threats began. Two of their friends were found badly beaten, left for dead in the back of a car. Another disappeared one afternoon and was never seen again. Harold found himself without a

job, the first sign that these people were a good deal better connected than the students and hippies whose protest they were hijacking.

And in the end my mother was followed one night, and abducted, and driven some distance and held in the car at knifepoint while someone whose face she couldn't see explained that if they didn't stop digging then their next homes would be shallow and for ever and in a forest where nobody walked. She was raped, by four men, before being thrown out of the car on the edge of town, naked and with her hair cut off.

After that my father changed. He hunted them down. For four months he and my mother left the world and everyone in it behind, plunging deeper into darkness until they found the candle shedding light in its centre. The others never knew the details of what went on during this time, only that my parents had changed. They still saw the Hopkinses, but now that they were no longer fighting the good fight there didn't seem as much to hold the group together. Don began to talk about strange things, about some big, loose conspiracy run by people trying to break down our society from within. The other three wouldn't listen, not at first. It sounded too much like the ravings of a couple whose grip on reality was no longer reliable.

And then one night the two of them had come into the bar where they all usually met. Mary had been drunk, after an argument with Davids, and didn't even speak to them. My father had taken Harold to one side and talked to him urgently. At first Harold had been reluctant, but in the end the three left together, leaving Mary in the bar with Lazy Ed. These two did the obvious thing and got shit-faced and then went into the woods and slept together. By the Lost Pond, in fact. Harold and Mary had stopped living with each other pretty soon afterwards.

The other three had driven for four hours to a place up in the hills of southern Oregon. They had been armed, and they came upon the place quietly. My mother and father had somewhat lost their perspective by this point, though they might have believed they had found it — that they had learned the harsh lesson that when it comes to the struggle between the people who believed in life, and those who believed in death, the battle had to be fought on the latter's terms.

The camp was in a clearing half a mile off the road, deep in the forest. A cluster of cabins, hand-built and arranged in a circle, the way things used to be. After my mother had looked at each man and confirmed they had been involved in the incident, the three moved quickly, and they shot everyone they found.

There was silence in Harold's living room.

'You went in and shot everyone? My parents shot people?'

'Not the women and children,' Davids said. 'And we didn't shoot to kill. But we shot the men. Each of

them. In the leg. Or the shoulder. Or the balls. Depending.'

'I don't blame them,' I said. I didn't know whether I meant this or not. I probably did. 'If what you're saying is true, then I don't blame either of them for what they did.'

'Oh it's true,' he said. 'I was there. The last man we found was the one who'd held the knife to your mother's throat. We didn't realize it then, but this wasn't just some group of rednecks off on their own. They had a cause. They've always been around. Your parents found this man sitting alone in his cabin. And your father, the great Don Hopkins, junior realtor, put a gun to his face and shot him dead.'

I tried to see that night, to see my father in that position, and I realized I had never really known him at all. I felt as if information was spilling out of my eyes.

'Then they heard a sound from the other room in the cabin, and Beth went through. The man's wife had left him, or he'd killed her. Either way she'd left their children behind. Twins, barely six months old, wrapped together in a little cot and now orphans. Two little children, exactly what Beth most wanted and couldn't have.' Davids shook his head. 'At least, that's the way they told it. I wasn't there for that part. Perhaps they saw the children first. Maybe Beth found the little ones and your father thought he saw a way to make up for what had been done to her. Maybe they decided that they were allowed one shot to kill.'

'My parents weren't liars,' I said.

'So you knew about all this, did you?'

'They weren't liars,' I repeated, uselessly. 'And this is all crap.'

'What happened to the children?' Bobby asked.

'We brought them back to Hunter's Rock. Don and Beth raised them for a while. But in the end it was decided that they had to be separated. Beth was very, very unhappy about the idea, and so was your father, but the rest of us decided that it simply wasn't safe. The babies weren't the only thing taken from the man's cabin. We found a lot of papers and books. Some were very, very old. There was proof that your parents had been right. There was a conspiracy. The people up in the woods were part of it. Beth and Don thought that they would be able to change the way you were, that environment was more important. It was very big back then, that idea. Not so popular now, of course, not with all this fuss about the human DNA thing and all that. Now everyone thinks that chemicals explain everything.'

'The babies were split up,' Bobby said.

'They kept one, and the other was taken far away. The idea was that they might stand more of a chance if they didn't have each other to reinforce the way they were. Or maybe it was a neat little experiment, Ward, cooked up by your father. Nature versus nurture. I didn't ever really understand.'

'Versus what nature, Harold? If this is true, and all this happened, why the big fear about the nature of

the babies?'

'Well,' he said. 'Because of your genes, of course. Because you were so non-viral. So pure.'

'Jesus Christ,' I shouted, 'You don't believe that shit, do you? You don't really think…' I stopped,

suddenly blindsided. 'Wait a minute. This has to do with the social virus idea?'

'Of course. But how do you know about it?'

'We found The Straw Men's Web site.'

'But how do you even know about them?'

'Dad left a video,' I said. 'I had just found it when you came to the house that time. It had all of you on

it, though I didn't realize at first. He left me a note, too. Saying they weren't dead.' Davids shook his head, and smiled faintly. 'Don,' he said. 'He always planned ahead.' His smile was

affectionate, but not only that.

'But if all this happened in Hunter's Rock,' Bobby said, 'how come you all came here?'

'We hung together for a few more years. We had some good nights, but it wasn't the way it had been. After a while I left. I came to Dyersburg. To start again. Mary came out a year later. It didn't work. But she stayed in town. For a long time after that, we were out of contact with the others. Partly it was thought to be for the best. Also, well… we'd done some pretty bad things. On the night it had seemed the right thing to do. We got caught up in it, I guess. Frustration that nothing in the world had changed, despite everything we had done, and we were still at the mercy of men like that. But afterwards it wasn't something that any of us really wanted to remember. For Mary and Ed it wasn't so bad. They hadn't actually been there. But they were our friends, and so part of the blame bled off onto them. They knew about it, and kept it a secret with us.'

'My father and Ed bumped into each other once,' I said. 'Long time ago. I was there. They pretended they'd never met each other.'

'Not surprised,' Davids said. 'I don't think your father really trusted Ed to keep quiet. Though he did.'

'Did you know he was dead?'

'Not until you said so,' he said. 'I knew about Mary. I didn't think they'd go back for him. He wasn't

even there.'

A car drove past outside, and Davids's head turned like it was on a string. He waited until the sound had disappeared. I'd never seen a man who looked more as if he was expecting bad things to turn up at

his door.

'If you guys were supposed to be keeping apart, how come my parents relocated up here?'

'After over twenty years, and nothing happening, nobody coming for us, I guess Don started to feel that it was over. He was sometimes out this way on business, and he visited me a couple of times, and we shot a little pool, got to talking about old times. Before that bad night. The fun we'd had. The period when we felt like we were going to change the world. At first it was strange, and then it was like the other decades hadn't happened. He brought your mother up here for a weekend, and eventually they decided to move. Get the old gang back together. Be young again.'

'So how come they never told me that you'd known each other before?'

'Because…' Davids sighed. 'Because The Halls started construction just before they settled here, and Don got to hear about it. He got in touch, pitched to them. He wanted the business. He got it. And after a while he started to think there was something weird going on. After that, he decided we had to go back to pretending. He didn't really grow old, Don. Not like the rest of us. Your mother either, I guess. Most of us, comes a time when you're prepared to let things lie. Not Don. You put a secret in front of him, and

he had to know what it was. He had to understand.'

I nodded. This was true. 'So what happened?'

'He started poking around. Trying to find out who was behind the development, what they were up to. He became convinced it was the same people he'd run into years before, in Oregon. Well, not the same guys, but a better connected example of the same kind of people. That they were part of some worldwide movement. Some hidden group, moving behind the scenes.' He shook his head.

'You didn't think so?'

'I don't know what I thought. I just wanted him to leave it alone. Some people put too high a premium on the truth, Ward. Sometimes the truth isn't what you want to know. Sometimes the truth is best left to

itself.'

'And they found him out.'

'They realized someone was poking around. Couldn't tie it to him, but there were a very limited

number of people it could be. Things started to get harder for Don. Little things. I think they must have someone here in town.'

'They do,' I said. 'He's the man who shot Bobby. He's a policeman.'

'Oh Christ,' Davids said. 'Tell me he's dead.'

'What happened to my parents, Harold? What happened that night?'

'Don decided they had to leave, to disappear. It wasn't a story he could take to anyone. Even if they believed it, he'd have been admitting to murder. But I think he'd also decided that he was going to deal with them for good. I don't know how the hell he thought he was going to do that. The four of us had a combined age of about two hundred and fifty years. But… we were going to fake their death, make it look like they were out of the picture. Let The Straw Men think it was over. It was all organized.'

My heart skipped a beat, remembering the note left inside my father's chair, and realizing that he could have closed up UnRealty to make The Straw Men think it was all over, before coming back for them in some way. He'd done it to protect me. It wasn't because he'd distrusted me, and it didn't mean that they were…

Davids saw my face, and shook his head.

'They got to them first,' he said. 'Two days before we were going to do it. They were going to drive up to Lake Ely on the Sunday, go boating in the afternoon. Have an accident. Bodies never found. Then on Friday… well, you know what happened. They're dead, Ward. I'm sorry. They weren't supposed to be. But they're really dead. And soon, probably tonight, I will be too. And then it will all be over.'

'Fuck that,' Bobby said. 'Fuck that from here to there.' He unwrapped the towel from his arm. It was pretty bloody, but no more came out of the hole in his shirt. 'I'm good to go. Let's get up there and start

fucking these people around.'

Davids just shook his head. He looked jumpy. 'We're better off staying here.'

'Sir, with respect, I think not,' Bobby said. 'Last couple days have seen concerted culling of your old

crew. If they knew about Lazy Ed, they sure as fuck know about you.'

I was only dimly aware of either of them. I was trying to absorb what I had been told, was trying to realign everything I had thought I'd known about my family. About myself. Davids looked at me.

'It's all true,' he said. 'And I can prove it. Give me a minute, and I can prove it.' He stood up and left

the room.

'This is some weird shit,' Bobby said, when Davids was out of earshot. 'You believe any of it?'

'Why not?' I said, though I didn't know what to think. 'It fits, sort of. And why would he lie? He's

definitely the guy in the video, so he knew then. We know I wasn't born in Hunter's Rock. And I don't see him just making it up on the spot.'

Outside I heard the sound of another car going past, but nothing came of it. I stared at the wall until it began to sparkle in front of my eyes.

'My mother called me, about a week before the accident.'

'Did she hint at any of this?'

'I didn't speak to her. She left a message. I didn't get around to calling back. But usually she didn't call. If it was either of them, it was Dad, and generally they waited for me to get in touch.'

'So you think…'

'I don't know what to think, Bobby, and it's too late to find out.'

'So now what do we do?'

'I don't know.'

Bobby stood. 'I'm going to see if I can scare up some coffee. This arm is starting to hurt like a motherfucker.'

I listened to the sound of his feet disappearing down the corridor. Some part of me, unbidden and against all the evidence, had apparently been holding out hope that all of this, everything since the phone call from Mary when I was sitting on a porch in Santa Barbara, had been a mistake. Had been wrong. This part had created the dream by the swimming pool, tried to convince me that there was something worth hurrying for, that there might still be people to be saved. Now I knew that wasn't true, that there was room for no final effort. My father had a plan, of course. He always did. But the note I'd found was all that had been left of it.

My phone rang, scaring the hell out of me. The number on the screen wasn't familiar.

'Who's this?'

'Nina Baynam. Are you okay? You sound weird.'

'Kind of. What do you want?' I felt numb, and not in a mood to talk about serial killers or anything

else.

'We're in Dyersburg. Where are you?'

'34 North Batten Drive,' I said.

There was a beat before she replied. 'Could you repeat that?' Her voice now sounded odd. 'It

sounded like you said 34 North Batten Drive.'

'I did.'

'That's the address of a man called Harold Davids,' she said.

My heart did a hard double-thump. 'How the hell do you know that?'

'Just stay there,' she said. 'Be careful. We're on our way.'

The connection went dead. I turned to the door as I heard Bobby approach, but his face knocked

any words out of my mouth.

'Davids isn't here,' he said. 'He's gone.'

'Gone where?'

'Just gone. There's a door out the back.'

I ran to the front window, pulled the curtain aside. Where the big black car had been earlier, there

was now a space.

We turned Harold's house upside down. There was nothing to find — nothing that meant anything to us. Just a tidy old house full of tidy old things.

After ten minutes there was a hammering on the door downstairs.

33

Nina was still banging the door as I yanked it open. Zandt pushed straight past me and into the house, striding into the ground-floor rooms one after another. I turned to watch him go, my movements slow and vague. I felt like I was asleep, as if one dream had butt-joined into another.

'What's he doing?'

She ignored me. 'Where's Davids?'

'Gone,' I said. Her eyes were wide, with dark circles underneath. She didn't look like she'd slept in

days.

'Gone?' she shouted. 'Why on earth did you let him go?' She all but stamped her foot. Bobby emerged from the kitchen.

'We didn't,' he said. 'He just disappeared. What's it to you, anyway? How do you even know he

exists?'

She pulled a small pad out of her handbag and opened it, held it up to his face.

'The developers of The Halls are hidden behind about a million dummy corporations,' she said. 'But on the plane I tracked them, and we got close enough. What looks like the trustee company is Antiviral Global Inc., registered in the Cayman Islands. Mr Harold Davids of this address is their designated legal representative in Montana.'

'Fuck,' Bobby said, his face pale. He turned and stalked furiously back into the kitchen.

I stared at Nina. 'You've got it wrong. I've just been talking to him. To Davids. He told me … well, he told me a bunch of stuff. He knows about The Halls, yes. Certainly. But from the outside. He's not with them. He's tried to help my parents get away from these people.'

'I don't know what he told you,' Nina said. She looked up at the sound of Zandt coming out of the back room. He shook his head at her and hurried up the stairs. 'But I don't think Mr Davids is what he

seems.'

'What's Zandt looking for?'

'A body,' she said, simply. 'Hopefully not a dead one.' Her voice was slightly too flat, and I realized that beneath a hard-fought exterior, she was nearly vibrating with tension. The attempted throwaway was not convincing in the least. 'She's not going to be here. Harold is not your killer,' I said. 'He's an old man. He's…'

'Nina — you got a number for The Halls?' Bobby was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding the house phone.

She glanced into her notebook, flipped a page. 'We have 406-555-1689. But all you get is a recorded message and an interminable menu system. Why?'

Bobby smiled, sort of. He made a facial expression, anyway. 'Harold called that number. It's in his redial list, from twenty minutes ago. While we were in the house.'

'But…' I said. For a moment my mouth did nothing but move, without sound, as I tried to frame my objections. 'He looked freaked. You saw him. He was sitting here waiting, knowing they were going to come for him. Like they came for Mary and Ed. You saw him, for Christ's sake. You know how he looked.'

'Sure he looked frightened, Ward. But of us. Of us. He thought we knew about him. He thought we were going to whack him.'

Zandt came back down into the hallway. 'She's not here.'

Davids had seen me with a knife. He knew we had guns. But I was still at a loss. 'Why would he tell me anything, if he's with them?'

'You'd found out he was part of the Hunter's Rock group. You mentioned a video, a note. You recognized him. He didn't know how much else you knew. You could have been bluffing him. Simplest thing is to tell you the truth most of the way, and then switch it at the end.' He swore briefly but viciously, seeming to take the deception very personally.

Nina's face was a row of question marks. 'Who are the Hunter's Rock group?'

'Later,' I said. 'We've got to find Davids first.'

A cell phone rang. We all reached at once, like strung-out-six-shooters. But the call was for Zandt.

'Yeah?' he said.

'Hello, Officer,' said a voice. It was loud enough for us all to hear.

Zandt looked at Nina, talked into the phone. 'Who's that?'

'A friend,' the voice said. 'Though I admit we haven't met yet. Not my fault. You weren't good enough

to bring us together.'

Zandt was very, very still. 'Who is this?'

There was a chuckle down the line. 'I thought you'd guess. I'm The Upright Man, John.'

Nina's mouth dropped open.

'Bullshit.'

'Not bullshit. Well done on finding Wang. And for encouraging him to do the right thing. We owe you

one. He could have been an embarrassment.' Zandt's mouth was dry, and clicked when he spoke. 'If you're The Upright Man, prove it.'

Bobby and I stared at him.

'I don't have to prove anything,' the voice said. 'But I'll tell you something to your advantage. If you're

not out of that house in about two minutes, you'll be dead. All of you.'

The connection was cut.

'Out of the house,' Zandt said. 'Now.'

By the time we'd reached the street we could hear sirens approaching. A lot of sirens. I unlocked the

car and jumped into the driver's seat.

Nina stood her ground. 'I'm an FBI agent. We don't have to go anywhere.'

'Yeah, right,' Bobby said. 'We shot a couple of cops earlier. They're not dead, but we still shot them.

You want to stand in the middle of the road with your badge out, be my guest. This isn't HBO, princess. They're going to blow your fucking head off.'

The police had failed to double-up their approach, and we made it to the main drag without incident. I hung a right and put my foot down hard.

Within twenty minutes we were out of town and following the road as it slowly wound upward through the foothills. Nobody asked where I was going. Everyone knew.

Nina explained what had happened back in LA. I told them what Davids had told us. Zandt revealed, not in detail but sufficiently, his background with The Upright Man.

'Shit,' I said.

Bobby frowned. 'But how'd he get your cell phone number?'

'If he's tied in with The Straw Men, that's not going to tax them. They have a serial victim supply chain. They're blowing up things left, right and centre. A cell trace is child's play.'

'Okay — so why call? Why get you out before the cops got there?'

'There's no predicting why he'd do anything. But it wasn't just me he was thinking of. He knew I wasn't alone.'

'Davids told them who was in his house,' I said. 'He turned us in.' I was so bitterly furious that I could barely speak. 'And kind of funny, don't you think, that The Straw Men caught up with my parents two days before they were set to disappear? They planned everything out, had it all in place, and then just before they sidestepped out of danger suddenly there's McGregor setting up the accident that killed them.'

'Davids tipped them off? Why?'

'He knew what The Halls was about right from the start. Then Dad finds out about them, thinks he's got a business opportunity, but finds that's not what it is. Puts Davids in a very difficult position. Say these are the same people, or the same kind of people, that they went up against thirty years ago. Davids said that only the leader was killed outright. The rest presumably survived, could have told someone what happened. The bunch who created The Halls could have found out that Davids was one of the raiding

party — could even be why they contracted him as an attorney in the first place.'

'They're that well-connected, why use Davids? They could have hired anyone.'

'Right. But big-shot lawyers are also well-connected. Some of them even have delusions of honesty. The Straw Men can drop Davids off a cliff whenever they choose, and he knows it. 'Work for us or it becomes known what you did one night in a forest. Or frankly, we just fucking kill you.' What's he going to do? He's old, and afraid, and has everything to lose. He's also good. He's perfect for them.'

'Then your father gets too close, and Davids knows he's in deep trouble if he doesn't let The Straw Men know. So he tells them the Hopkinses are about to fly.'

There was silence in the car for a moment.

'He got them killed,' Nina said, quietly. 'The one man they thought they could really trust.'

'He's a dead man walking,' I said. 'There's no question about that.'

By the time we reached the mountains it had started to rain, cold silver lines against the darkness outside the windows. The river by the side of the road was a torrent. There was no other traffic.

'There's only four of us,' Nina said.

I glanced at her. 'So call for backup.'

'They're not going to scramble choppers on my say so. Most we'd get would be a couple of bored agents in a car in two hours, whose main goal would be proving I was a fuckup.' She looked out of the window for a moment. 'Does anyone here have a cigarette? I thought I might start smoking.'

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the battered pack and put it on the dash.

'I can't advise it,' I said. She returned my smile wanly, but let the cigarettes be.

Fifty minutes after leaving Davids's house, we swept round a long, gradual bend. I'd dropped our

speed by now and Bobby was sitting up so he could look at the walls of the hills as they sloped up from the road.

'We're nearly there,' I said.

I saw Nina watching as Bobby and Zandt loaded their guns, then reluctantly check her own weapon. Her fingers were unsteady. Neither man looked the way she probably felt, but I could have told her it was impossible to tell what went on in boy's heads. There isn't a man of our generation who can't quote the 'Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement I lost count myself speech from Dirty Harry. We all feel we should be capable of asking punks whether they felt lucky, of being our own portable Clint. And we all believe that someone, somewhere, will look down on us if we don't measure up.

Then Zandt happened to glance at her. He winked, and I saw her realize that it wasn't that after all. The movies might tell you how to behave, but the feeling ran far deeper, went back to the days when nobody wore clothes and everyone had their role and some tended fires and others ran with prey. The only differences lies in how big a group we feel a part of, the distance of our relationship to the people we'd defend to the death. Zandt was as nervous as she was. And so was I.

I pulled the car over onto the hard shoulder. 'That's it,' I said. About fifty yards ahead was the small gate.

'Nobody there,' Bobby said. 'Tell me again how the approach works.'

'You go through the gate, drive on grass. Swing round to the left and there's a hidden road, obscured by the trees. It winds up toward the high plain.'

'So there could be someone in the trees, or anywhere up the approach.'

'Pretty much.'

'Let's do it fast, then.'

I nodded. 'Everybody ready?'

'As we'll ever be,' Zandt said. I stepped on the pedal.

The car leaped forward, wheels spinning on the wet road. I sped down the remaining distance and then angled straight at the gate.

'Heads down,' Bobby said. Nina and Zandt complied. Bobby braced himself against the back of the seat and the car door, gun in his hand. A second later the car smashed through the gate, broken slats

smacking up off the windshield and sending a spiderweb across Nina's side. The car ploughed into the long grass, started to skid. I struggled with it, brought it round.

I backed off the pedal until I had it again, and then headed for the band of trees, picking up speed. I ran over a hump and saw Nina lift into the air for a moment. She'd barely landed before she was bounced up again. There was a grunt from the back as Zandt suffered the same fate. Bobby seemed to have been clamped to his seat.

There was a lower, harder bump and then suddenly the ground was flat underneath the wheels.

I sped past the trees, wincing. 'You see anyone?'

'No,' Bobby said. 'But don't slow down.'

After a hundred yards the road banked sharply to the right, and then we were heading up the gradient. Bobby was glancing from side to side as I yanked the car round bend after bend, but no shots came. But when he saw Zandt slowly bring his head up, he still reached out a hand to shove it back down. I saw him wince, but his shoulder didn't seem to be a big problem. For the time being.

'So where are they?' I asked.

'Probably all at the top, standing in a line.'

'You're a cheerful fuck. But I'm glad you're here.'

'Some kind of friendship thing, I guess,' Bobby said. 'Though this goes down badly, I'm going to

come back and haunt you.'

'You already are,' I said. 'Been trying to get rid of you for years.'

We slid round the last bend, and then the vast gate of The Halls was looming above us up the rise.

'Still no one,' I said, slowing the car down.

'What now?'

'Other side of the gate the road pans left. Couple of large buildings. Entrance stuff, and what looked

like storage. There's a high fence all the way across the pasture. The houses are on the other side.'

The other two cautiously raised their heads. 'So?'

'Front gate,' Bobby said. 'No way we're getting over that fence.'

'Entrance is where they're going to be waiting for us.'

'Got no choice.'

The car swept under the stone archway and down toward the clump of wooden buildings. A big light on one of them turned the parking lot a moonish and sickly white. Soon as it was all in vision, I pulled my foot off the pedal again. The car rolled into the centre of the lot and stopped. The lot was completely empty. I turned off the engine, left the keys in the ignition.

'What?' Nina asked.

'No cars. When I was here before it was full of cars.'

Zandt opened his door and got out without waiting for instructions. Bobby swore and emerged the other side, gun ready. The white light made them easy targets, but also showed that there was no one on the roof of the building. Nobody standing waiting. Just two big wooden buildings, and a stretch of fence in between.

Nina and I got cautiously out of the car. Nina's gun looked big and clumsy in her hand.

'That's the way in,' I said, nodding to the building on the right.

They followed me over and gathered either side of the glass doors. Bobby stuck his head out, scoped

the inside. 'Nobody behind reception,' he said.

'We going in?' 'I guess so. After you.' 'Hey — thanks for the opportunity.' I leaned forward, pushed one of the doors gently. No alarm went

off. Nobody shot at me. I opened the door and stepped in cautiously, the others behind.

The lobby area was silent. The background music was absent, and there was no fire in the grate of the river-rock fireplace. The large painting that had been behind the reception desk was gone. The whole

room felt as if it had been mothballed.

'Fuck,' I said. 'They've gone.'

'Bullshit,' Bobby said. 'It's only been an hour. There's no way they had the time to clear out.'

'They had a little longer,' Zandt admitted. 'When we left Wang, it was maybe five or ten minutes

before he shot himself. He could have called a warning through.'

'It's still not long. Not to pack up everything.'

'So maybe they were already on their way,' Nina said. 'You kicked the shit out of their realtor. Could be that was message enough, and that would have given them a couple days. Doesn't matter. We're still going to go look at what's out there.'

She started to stride toward the door at the end, the one that would open out into the inner area of The Halls. She looked filled with a kind of wretched fury, a horror that they could have arrived too late, that the phantom she had chased until it was the only light at the end of her tunnel had danced out of reach again.

We were standing still. She evidently didn't care if we came with her. She had to go out there. She had to see.

She didn't hear the shot.

By the time the sound reached our ears she was already falling, thrown awkwardly sideways to crash into one of the low tables. Her mouth opened to cry out, but nothing came. Zandt ran toward her.

I whirled to see a man in the doorway. McGregor. Bobby instead saw a woman behind the reception desk, and a muscle-bound youth emerging from a recessed doorway behind her, a door camouflaged to blend in with the wood panelling.

All three had guns. All were firing them.

The youth died first. His technique was pure television: gun held out sideways, gangbanger style. Bobby had him down with one shot.

I slipped behind one of the pillars and straight out the other side, getting McGregor first in the thigh, then the chest. I still only narrowly avoided taking one to the face, felt the hum as it spun past my head. I dropped to one knee and scooted behind one corner of the reception, praying the woman hadn't seen me. Reloaded, dropping half the bullets.

Zandt knelt down next to Nina, who lay crumpled, her hand fluttering toward the hole in her chest. It was high up, just under the right clavicle. 'Oh, Nina,' he said, oblivious to the cracks and whines in the air

above him. She coughed, her face caught between surprise and denial.

'Hurts,' she said.

McGregor was still shooting. The woman behind the desk nearly took Bobby out before I took a breath and stood up, emptying half of my gun into her. Only when she'd slewed backward over the muscle man did I realize it was the woman who'd talked me through the fake entry requirements. I still didn't know her name.

Bobby was standing over McGregor, his boot on the cop's wrist. A gun lay on the floor several feet away.

'Where'd they go?' he asked him. 'And how long ago? Tell me everything you know, or darkness falls.'

'Fuck you,' the cop said.